Papers please passport has no seal12/16/2023 ![]() In fact, the keen, interactive treatment of repressive regimes, combined with smoothly ramping play, makes this a fine point of entry into the serious games genre for someone who might otherwise scoff. The game is perfectly amenable to players coming and going from that awareness, dropping in just enough reminders of both its game-like giddiness and somber reflection to avoid coming off as heavy-handed. I only needed a few hours to reach an out-of-body experience where I watched myself fall heartlessly into the gameplay, into celebrating my correct dismissals and ignoring the slowly building, strangely gripping story of Eastern European repression. Before you know it, you're callous enough to shout something awful or demeaning at your screen, “You're outtttta here!” like a baseball ump. So much better, in fact, that you'll race to slap that “DENY” on a person's visa-or worse, rush to detain them in prison and pocket a small bribe from a prison guard. Soon, you'll be memorizing city names rather than looking them up and getting better at noticing false bits of data immediately. Maybe you write them out and put them on your in-game computer desk. The low-res screen doesn't leave much room for things like your giant tome of regulations. Saving money will cost you, as a suffering family will only get sick and require expensive medicine.īudget woes will probably pile up in your first playthrough, so you'll have to find ways to play faster and smarter. On a slow or error-filled day, you'll have to nix enough budget items to continue. You'll need that money to pay for rent, food, and heat for your family of four. At day's end, you're given a report: The more visitors you correctly admit or reject, the more cash you pull in the more errors you make or fraudulent passports you admit, the more fines you pay. You need it, and going too slowly or making too many mistakes will cost you-and your family-greatly.Ī day in Papers, Please lasts for only six minutes of real time, and an extra rule typically gets added as the calendar turns. You may start your new border-control career thinking of it as an innocent, puzzle-filled abstraction, but to succeed, you must buy into the meta-narrative: that you have won a lottery to get this job. Once you're hooked, the soul-crushing stuff kicks in. AdvertisementĮnlarge / Through those stamps, you wield immense power over the virtual citizens. Passport holders have little cheery to say when they're not pleading to get in, they're offering bribes, issuing propaganda, or delivering bombs. Papers, Please looks intentionally unrefined, using pixelated designs, sullen faces, and a cold, harsh color palette to present its sad scene. If this were a real country, the game wouldn't make for great tourist publicity. You get to decide whether you cast off your allegiances and join the resistance, helping "bad" guys and risking your job, or be a good little booth supervisor and reject the winds of change (which brings its own consequences). Make a decision, then let the next person up to the window and repeat.Ī plot centered on a political uprising quickly emerges on top of this daily grind. Interrogate the person when things don't match up. Often, that means finding fake and forged documents, which all of those charts and lists in your office will help you verify.Ĭheck a person's passport to confirm country names, diplomatic seals, and code numbers. As a border control guard in a fictional Eastern European country, your actions are mostly confined to shuffling papers and confirming or denying someone's entry into Arstotzkan. Papers, Please is the latest in a growing wave of "serious" games that aren't educational, per se, but where the "fun factor" isn't immediately evident. Thank goodness I get a moment between visitors for a sip of coffee. I have too many people to process if I expect to get paid, if I expect to feed my family. What, does he expect me to change the way of the world from within this tiny booth? Or some jerk blows himself up right next to my booth. Or an occasional wimp cries as he's detained for fraudulent documents. until they try to slip revolutionary propaganda through the window slip. You sometimes forget that these people have lives. There's almost a meditative quality to protecting our borders from the endless procession of people and documents that come through every day. ![]() It's easy to fall into a grind here at the Arstotzkan border. KA-THUNK! Glory to Arstotzkan! Next! Slurrrp. You'd think someone who waited all night at the border would have noticed his passport number doesn't match his entry visa number! Idiot. Maybe a sip of coffee will help me relax and get on with it. Maps, lists, document guides, daily news reports, photo galleries. I have so many documents to review in my small booth today.
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