Papers Please Review

It’s a scene that we’re all familiar with. Our dashing hero has finally made it out of the tunnel, or the prison, or the elaborate death-trap constructed by the villain at a secret mountain hideout. The immediate danger is gone, but there’s that one catch that still poses a problem: how are you getting over the border? I don’t care whether you’re Jason Bourne or James Bond, at some point in your journey, an official behind a desk is going to peer at you suspiciously and say those impersonal words: “Papers, please.” If played right, this simple situation can have a big payoff. It’s an instant game of poker to hand over forged or incomplete documents, and then try to appear casual as you pray to all that’s holy that the man over the counter isn’t really doing his job all that well. There was enough tension in this single concept to form the entire basis to last year’s “Argo”. Now, we finally get to see the other side of the story: just what is going through that clerk’s head anyway?

Behold the power of the stamp of approval

Papers Please is described by its developer Lucas Pope as “a dystopian document thriller”. You play as a humble worker in the almost-but-not-quite-Soviet nation of Arstotzka. Your job is to sit in your booth and decide who gets to come into the country, and who doesn’t. If that sounds like an incredibly boring premise for a game, then it’s to the developer’s credit that it turns out to be so engaging. The game sports a simplified pixelated aesthetic, with the only real visual variety coming from the different characters who step into your booth.

The basic gameplay in Papers Please is simple: each level of the game is a work day with a strict time limit, and you must cycle through as many people as possible before your shift is over. For every person you process, you’ll earn a little money, and since food and rent for your close-to-starving family usually takes up your entire paycheck, you can’t afford to be lazy. Be quick and efficient, and you’ll go through maybe ten or twelve applicants. Get stuck on tricky case, and you’ll have to sacrifice your apartment’s heating for a night.

At least the all powerful State still lets me decorate my cubicle

Here’s where the game focuses in on its core gameplay mechanic: document verification. Your job is to look at each person’s passport (and other papers), and see if there’s anything fishy that warrants a barrier to entry. Do they look different than their photograph? Is their passport expired? Do their verbal responses to basic questions match the information in their papers? The game nicely introduces these restrictions one by one before slowly ramping up the level of difficulty by adding more and more rules to follow. Do their fingerprints match what’s on record? Are they from an enemy country? Are they too young or too old for their claims to make sense?

You’re constantly under pressure to check each of these aspects as fast as you can, and every few days some rules will fall out of use, and new ones will take their place. Sometimes workers will require special passes, for example, or they’ll need proof of immunization. Don’t think you can just scuff off in order to get through as many as possible either: rejecting or admitting the wrong person will be tracked back to your employment record, and will end up with a harsh fine from your already-meager pay check. Eventually, the game will even throw in some very light combat elements and puzzle-solving to spice things up. That said, for most players it still won’t be enough to overcome the monotony of having the same screen load for every single level.

There are more rules to look up than in a D&D session

As it turns out, the game actually presents a decent story as the gameplay unfolds. Pay attention to who steps into your booth, and you’ll not only spot some cameos from appropriately dystopian stories, you’ll find yourself wrapped up in all sorts of intrigues that put you in difficult positions. Should you accept a bribe in exchange for letting an illegal immigrant through? Should you follow the commander’s orders when he breaks protocol? Should you aid the mysterious rebel group who keeps slipping you notes? These situations all provide a surprising amount of substance in the form of sub-plots to the overall survival story.

And make no mistake, this IS a survival story. The first time I slipped up, my wife and son got sick, and when I couldn’t earn the money for their medicine, they died from lack of treatment. Ouch, that was harsh. This isn’t any sissy dysentery from Oregon Trail either: when your family members start dying in-game, it’s because you didn’t work as efficiently as you should. The level of tension gives excellent meaning to the aforementioned choices like bribe-taking: that extra hundred dollars really could mean the difference between surviving one more level, or being sent to the gulags as punishment for being in debt.

On the other hand, if you do your job well (or, more probably, sneakily get in on the bribery racket), you’ll be able to afford a few upgrades to your booth to let you work faster. These are a controversial aspect of the game, because what this means is that the game essentially allows you to buy a better control scheme, which in turn implies that otherwise, you’ll be fighting against the controls while you play. This is widely regarded as a very bad way to generate challenge in a game, and the only comment that can be made in defense of this unlock system is that it at least makes your purchases a true joy to get.

Dear diary, today I finally empathized with those NSA agents

Possibly the best aspect of Papers Please is the way it deals with and explores a wide variety of the most important issues involved, far deeper than you see in any AAA title. Take just the single topic of the right to privacy. Progress deep enough into the game, and you’ll eventually unlock some decision trees that require you to do a photographed strip-search of applicants within the booth. The game wisely lets you toggle the level of nudity in the settings menu, but even so, the feeling produced in-game is simultaneously disgusting and eerie: you’ll need to personally review the naked images of these malnourished or aging blue-collar men and women before letting them get on with their normal lives. What’s more, you’ll need to do it in as snappish and impersonal a way as possible (after all, your family is starving, remember?). But even in an issue so obviously distressing concept, the game never leaves the morality as black-and-white; it turns out that every now and then, your strip searches catch a bomb or other weapon. So it turns out the state’s totalitarian rules end up saving dozens of lives, and that certainly justifies the searches. Or does it?

In the end, Papers Please is one of those odd games whose greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it truly does convey the dark and gloomy sense of living within a totalitarian state. Papers Please subtly builds up a rich atmosphere of fear, tension, and desperation, but it also has a healthy dose of monotony and captivity. There’s no music outside of the title screen, no variety in setting, and the overall aesthetic of the game is cold and unwelcoming. In other words, although Papers Please will definitely generate a strong challenge, it won’t necessarily be a pleasant one. Players who find themselves developing document-scanning strategies might just realize that they are actually playing a work-simulator, and in an uncanny way, the ‘fun’ of the game lies in the fact that it’s not fun at all.

Even desk clerks need to pick up a few combat skills

However, even if though it’s not always fun, it’s definitely always engaging. If you can swallow the bitter pill that is compromised controls and paperwork-focused gameplay, the game actually provides a few decent incentives for replay. The fact that your decisions affect the storyline (and that the game cleverly tells you which of the twenty endings you’ve achieved) gives the game a good “Choose Your Own Adventure” drive that’s complemented nicely with the level-by-level save system. That said, for a game whose strength lies mainly in its thematic exploration, these draws might not be enough to motivate a return.

If you’re one of those types (like me) who likes to play games for their thematic content and revelation of interesting dilemmas, Papers Please is well worth the ten dollars and ten hours. However, if you like your games to be pleasant, fun, and action-packed, this game won’t scratch that particular itch.