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It might be as depressing in many ways, but there is plenty of fun to be had here. Guess who?īy this point, you might be thinking that Papers, Please is about as appealing a prospect as Saturday night TV. You're just a poor schmuck trying to pay his rent and keep his family fed. There is only the depressing and increasingly absurd trudge of bureaucracy.Īll that other stuff - the intrigue, the grim characters, the heroism - that all happens around you. There are no rooftop chases, assassination missions, or tense stealth sections. You're the border guard of a fictional totalitarian eastern European state in the early '80s.Īs set-ups go, it's already pretty promising, isn't it? But what ensues isn't a cold war spy game. More than that, it's a rare game that actually makes you feel things beyond the usual emotional gamut of the medium.
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In Papers, Please, however, they’re tasks that are every bit as weighty as any gun battle or puzzle, and they make for a uniquely enjoyable game experience.ģ909 provided us with a Papers, Please PS Vita code for review purposes.We often criticise bad games for feeling too much like monotonous work, but Papers, Please looks, feels, and plays like monotonous work - and it's fantastic.
And, in real life, you may be right (though having known people who worked at borders, I’d argue otherwise).
I know that reviewing daily regulations and double-checking birth dates and passport numbers sounds like it’s the most mind-numbing work ever. Whether you think that strict border controls are the greatest thing ever or an affront to basic humanity, you’ll undoubtedly find your beliefs and perceptions clashing with the in-game demands. While Papers, Please’s in-game politics - based loosely on East and West Germany, circa 1982 - have their own intellectual and emotional considerations, you also can’t help but interpret them through the lens of today, which in turn is undoubtedly different than what developer Lucas Pope intended when he initially created the game. I’d argue that, notwithstanding the fact that the game was still released in a post-9/11 world, the politics of border security are vastly different today than they were five years ago.
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After all, Papers, Please originally came out on PC in 2013. Papers, Please is the kind of game where there aren’t necessarily any right decisions, and it makes for a compelling experience.Īs a sidenote, it’s also interesting to consider how the broader social and political context shapes how you perceive a game. On top of that, you have to consider how much weight to give the needs of your in-game family - looking the other way and allowing a husband and wife to remain together may make you feel better about yourself for a moment, but it could also mean that you have to forgo heat or food for a couple of days. There’s a lot of drama inherent in this premise, and it plays out with every person pleading to go across the border, with every bribe you get offered to turn a blind eye, with every broader socio-political act that gets filtered down to the rules you have to follow (or not) in your day-to-day job. That said, you don’t need any kind of higher education to appreciate this game. It’s fascinating to think about how rules and regulations shape our society and our interactions with government, so it’s amazing to see a game like Papers, Please that gives such thought experiments life. It’s a different way of looking at the gamification of mundane tasks, but it works spectacularly well.Īdmittedly, as a technocratically-minded public servant with a lifelong interest and a couple of degrees in politics, this kind of game is basically my dream come true. And if you happen to be doing your job in an totalitarian dictatorship, where the government’s penalties for acting improperly tend more towards the gulag than written reprimands, suddenly every document you check becomes a matter of literal life and death. If, however, you’re working at a border, checking every little detail on every passport and visa and work permit, where there can be tragic consequences if even just one wrong person gets through, things get a little more serious. If you’re working in your standard 9-to-5 job, there’s not really a lot riding on you getting every single detail right.
As anyone who’s ever worked a menial office job could tell you, usually the only thing you have to worry about - aside from mind-numbing tedium - is papercuts.Īs Papers, Please shows, however, context matters. Clerical work isn’t normally the kind of thing you’d associate with intense, high-stakes drama.