Papers, Please!

[IamLEAM1983]

Every once in a while, you run into a little something unexpected; something that lets you pick up on a bit of knowledge that you hadn't grasped yet. Considering how I was born in 1983, I never really developed a conscious knowledge of the pre-Collapse conditions during Berlin's occupation. I also never paid much attention to the USSR back when it was a thing, mostly because I was too busy learning my ABCs. I've missed out on the tedium of ideologically controlled immigration points, with today's fairly humdrum events involving the crossing of the border towards Uncle Sam's land not fazing me much. I do get the gist, though : the officers check to see if you look like yourself and if your date of birth matches up, they do a quick once-over to make sure you're not packing a rap sheet the length of Florida, and try and keep an eye on any and all outstanding warrants. It's a tough job, seeing as you have to do the same things over and over and still maintain enough mental agility through the tedium.

Who knows – you might need to uncover a stash of cocaine or stop someone who's going on a psychotic joyride with far too many guns for his own good...

Papers, Please throws you into that exact combination of mind-numbing tedium and sleuthing, as it asks you to step in the shoes of a fictitious USSR-like province border patrol agent. It's tedious, but unlike in most games, this is actually a good thing. The rythm that is soon established might drive you to put your brain on Autopilot, and half the fun is trying to beat that reflex, to be really, seriously sure that face matches or that the date of birth on the passport matches with what's on the permit. Initially, your salary and your crammed wife, son, daughter and own parents are all that's riding on your meagre pay. Given time, the stakes will be raised from the already portentous to the seriously threatening, as you'll eventually be told to watch out for extremely specific immigrants-to-be. Your initial cases of passports being falsified in crayon are going to feel like an absolute cakewalk, once you'll be stuck pruning through a passport's presented vital statistics and hoping that an applicant's fingerprints match with something obtained from the Armed Forces ministry. Worse still, you'll have to do that while the rest of the queue is putting pressure on your back. You're paid by the processed head, and the more noggins you clear, the better you're paid.

Assuming you don't chew through your pay stub with repeated violations.

The game isn't impressive from a graphical point of view, but it isn't trying to be. Once adequately designed talking head and a few decent lines of text can go a long way. Everything is made out of very Nintendo-esque pixels, but it still manages to tug at your heartstrings a bit.

That goes without mentioning the fact that penalties aside, you're free to be a bitch. Wanna break that poor and legally admissible woman's heart? Deny her entry into her sister's homeland. Sure, your son and daughter will inevitably come up with a fever and require every cent you have to pay for medicine – but you're generally free to ignore that, too.

That is, until the Game Over screen. A combination of bad judgment, poor reflex controls and laziness can destroy your playthrough, and this is exactly what makes Papers, please such an engaging little title. It's not big and it isn't long, but it exposes the turmoils of immigration in a Second World country.