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Soon, your tasks mount up and you’re having to check all sorts of information, across many different forms of ID, travel tickets, work permits and so on. It all sounds simple enough, right? To start with, it is. The story sets you as the winner of the October Labor Lottery and your job is to inspect the documentation of travellers that wish to pass into the glorious lands of Arstotzka, ensuring that all of the paperwork is complete and valid for that person's travel.
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But it’s so much more than it first seems. Papers, Please is based on the developer’s own dealings with border patrol. From the outset it looks like someone has taken the menial idea of checking people’s travel documentation and turned it into a drab looking game and partially, that’s right. Papers, Please by Lucas Pope is one of those games. It's also a very late contender for the best mobile game of the year.// Reviews // 23rd Aug 2013 - 8 years ago // By Steven John Dawson Papers, Please ReviewĮvery now and then, a game comes along that when you see it, you stand back and think “How in the world is that going to make for an interesting game?”. Papers, Please is compelling, thought-provoking, challenging, occasionally funny and frequently surprising. You might find juggling the constantly-multiplying bits of paper and card and rule books and interrogation gizmos a bit fiddly and unwieldy, but that's kind of the point.
#PAPERS PLEASE GAME REVIEW PC#
Papers, Please is a conversion of a PC game, but you wouldn't know it. That's aided by a low-res 8-bit art style that's perfectly in keeping with the period, not to mention highly functional. It's challenging and repetitive, but surprisingly light and easy to pick up and play. This constant tug between personal, moral, and political issues might sound weighty, but it never gets in the way of Papers, Please as a mobile game. And there's never quite enough money to go around at the best of times. You might be asked to bend the rules in some way for either personal gain or moral reasons, and with a couple of slip-ups allowed before you're charged, it's within your power to do so.īut at the end of each day, you've got to apportion your meagre income to your extended family's well-being, including heating, food, and medicine. You may need to obtain fingerprints to check that a person is who they say they are, or to initiate a full-body scan (you can now turn nudity on or off from the options menu).
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There may be a terrorist attack from a neighbouring state that not only ends your working day early (leaving you with a lower wage), but adds a further layer of authentication on subsequent days. The complexity of your job increases as you progress, and as new side-tasks are introduced. You might even have the option to forcibly eject them. If not, you must use your analysing tool to point out the discrepancy, interrogate the accused, and - typically - bring down your big red 'Denied' stamp. Is it all in date? Does the face before you match the ID photo? You need to check that all of the information in their passports, work permits, and other documentation matches up. Playing like an amalgam of Guess Who, spot the difference, and one of those task-juggling time management games we used to play before mobile games got good, its up to you to check through the paperwork of an endless line of returning natives, migrant workers, holiday-makers, and other visitors. 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. 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.