Sometimes when the stars align (in an awkward sort of way) we as gamers are presented with a game that has us torn. Positively, utterly torn.
Before I get to the reason this game tears me apart, I should explain the premise. You won the job lottery and now you must work in a checkpoint booth, inspecting passports to determine whether travelers may or may not pass into Arstotzka, and approving or disapproving of them accordingly. If you’re thinking you’ll just approve everyone and get your work day over with as quickly as possible, think again. Your wages are obscenely low and you’re trying to support your family of 4, who can die without being properly cared for. Approving someone who has discrepant information or disapproving someone who is clear to pass will result in a pay cut at the end of the day.
You start each day by reading your memo, which fills you in on the rules of the day. As the political temperature changes, the checkpoint security may become more or less strict. For instance, at first you’ll only need to check passports and verify that the information is correct, then stamp the passport accordingly.
One thing worth noting (although it’s not a big deal now) is that I had spent almost 5 minutes clicking around confused about how I even interact with documents placed at my desk. I tried left-clicking, right-clicking, hitting keyboard buttons, and dragging the passports to various slots on my desk before I realized you must drag documents over to the right in order to view them in detail. This isn’t mentioned anywhere in-game, and prevented me from playing at all until I figured it out for myself.
Discrepancies must be found and noted for anyone who is not clear to pass. It could be any detail; names don’t match on documentation, the passport could be out of date, the picture could look nothing like the person standing in front of you, the passport could be from a place that doesn’t exist, etc. Pointing out discrepancies is actually fairly fun and gives a great sense that you’re really investigating and discovering these things for yourself. For instance, if the passport is outdated, you select both the date on the card (every piece of information has its own hotspot) and the current date on your desk; it will link the discrepancy, and you can proceed to deny the passport after bringing this up to the individual. They’ll almost always resist and beg you to pass, but you must deny them if you don’t want to be penalized.
Every day is more complex than the last, adding more rules and invariably more paperwork and cross-checking to each applicant. Just a day before my family died of illness, the process was so complex that each person had to have a passport, a letter to explain what their purpose was in traveling, an ID if they were a Arstotzkan citizen, and people of a particular nationality were to be photographed nude to investigate contraband they might have on their person.
Alas, there are only so many hours in the day. As you start to shuffle through 3-4 pieces of paper, cross-checking every piece of information to ensure consistency, you’ll realize you’re taking a very long time to put each individual person through the checkpoint, which is affecting your salary. Your impulse will be to work faster, but if you do, then you sacrifice accuracy and might make approval mistakes. It was at this point that I came to the dilemma mentioned at the beginning of the review.
Papers, Please is a fantastically built game that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. Its gameplay makes perfect sense, and the systems are slick and mostly intuitive. The flip side is that because I actually felt like I was performing this job, I found myself not having fun a lot of the time. I’m shuffling papers around, I’m straining to find discrepancies, and at the end of the day my family is getting sicker and hungrier as the rent goes up and my wages remain the same.
That’s fine, I didn’t like this job very much anyways.
There are occasional surprising high points, like the chuckles to be had when a crazy guy walks up to the booth with a passport drawn in crayon or when a stripper comes through and leaves you her calling card, but they only lighten the mood temporarily. As the game goes on, you also become embroiled in an interesting political plot through strange things people drop off at your desk, but sifting over these things has to be done very quickly as you scramble to continue rushing applicants through the checkpoint, and you don’t have much time to feel interested.
I give the game a 3/5 not out of malice, but out of feeling dreary and oppressed as I play a game where the intent is to make you feel dreary and oppressed. Do we score the game highly because that’s the intent, or do we score the game based on how much fun we had? I don’t have a clue. Not a damn clue. But I would still recommend everyone at least try Papers, Please so they can make that determination for themselves. For this is not a mediocre 3/5, rather a confused and hopeful 3/5.
