Game:

Papers, Please (2013)

Category:

Review

Duration: 4:48

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2013’s critically acclaimed indie title, Papers Please, has returned with a re-release on the iPad

You play an immigration officer for the fictional country of Arstotzka, basically just deciding who to let in and who to decline as tiny pixelated people walk up to your booth with – sometimes fraudulent – paperwork. You have to scan expiry dates, photos, names, heights, weights, jobs, locations and a handful of other things to check if someone is legally entitled to enter the wonderful Arstotzka, and decline people who rock up to your booth with inaccuracies.

The process of checking so many separate things is, in a really strange way, addictive. I’m still not entirely sure why, but it’s probably partly because it is quite flawlessly done. Most of the information you need to cross-check is readily available in your neatly organised booth, with some of it in a nearby handbook, but it’s all available on one single screen. So, as an example, say someone has an expired passport. You check the date on their passport, then check the date that’s listed in your booth, then press a fat red button to ‘check for discrepancy’, click both dates and the game will tell you if there is, indeed, a discrepancy detected. You’ll then ask the pixelated person standing in your booth about the expired passport and they’ll either come up with a lame excuse or provide a new passport, which is when you get to either smack their passport with a deny or accept button. Man, denying people is satisfying.

And you do have to be careful, because there is more to the game than checking documents. If you let through people you shouldn’t have, you’ll either get a warning, or that person will straight up bomb the immigration area, and your day will be cut short, forcing you to go home with less money. Yup, you’re basically working on commission – every person you let through earns you a certain amount of money, and being that you live in this apparently awful economy, you need it.

At the end of each work day, which is based on real-time, you get sent to a text screen that tells you the general ‘status’ of 4 of your family members, and your expenses. You need to pay for rent, heat, food and sometimes even medicine, mostly by processing arrivals. You can also accept bribes for certain things, but you risk getting caught, and if you let through 3 people you shouldn’t have during the day, you lose money. So, then there’s this stressful thing where you know you have to process people really quickly in order to save your rapidly dying family, but the faster you process applicants, the more likely you are to screw up.

And, it’s not really that there’s too much empathy with your family who are just listed as text and ‘hungry’ or ‘sick’ or ‘cold’, but it provides a goal beyond ‘do well’. And, initially, that was enough to keep me hooked, but it gets even more intense. It even gets emotionally shocking – I felt really uncomfortable accidentally turning people away, or being forced to body-scan some people based on their heritage, or declining someone’s spouse because they had one inaccuracy, or accusing a woman of being a man based on the way she looked. For a pixelated, simple game, it’s extremely stressful and I do wonder if I’ll look at people differently next time I’m at the airport.

But, the most interesting part of the game, is the outcomes. You’re faced with a handful of choices from different characters, including a particularly interesting organisation called Ezic. Most of these choices just involve choosing wether or not to let someone through even though you know they’re illegal, and how that affects the game world. For example, my playthrough ended after I cracked a simple code Ezic had handed me over 2 separate days on sheets of paper, and let a man from the organisation in in exchange for one thousand dollars.

With my newfound wealth, I upgraded my apartment and then my neighbours noticed, and told the authorities. Ezic came by the next day and promised to help me out if I let another one of their members through who would come through later in the day, but I accidentally let through someone I shouldn’t have who then suicide bombed the area, and my day was cut short before the Ezic member arrived to help me. So, the authorities threw me in jail for supporting that organisation, and I’m still not entirely sure what happened to my family. It was totally unexpected, but kind of fascinating to watch unfold – especially because I couldn’t stop double-guessing my choice to upgrade apartments even prior to being told I had been reported to the authorities. Rough.

So, the two screens you see during gameplay provide a pretty intense journey, with a mix of fascinating and really, really funny characters, despite usually only saying a few words each. For such a small thing, it has a lot of personality. And excellent music!
- Alanah

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