At this point, I was simply playing the good employee, not letting ANYONE sneak in for any reason, even when the game clearly implies that you’re supposed to. Upon scanning him (which includes full-frontal nudity if you turn the option on, though for you pervs out there, it’s not exactly erotic) you confirm that he’s trying to sneak drugs across the border. Eventually, he does get the right paperwork, but his listed weight is different, which implies he’s smuggling something on his person. This is before you’re given the option to detain people. Then he shows up with a fake passport that looks like it was made with a set of crayons. He shows up at first without any papers, so you reject him. I’ll give you an example: there’s a dude that shows up frequently in the game named Jorji who is, for the lack of a better term, a fucking moron. And the worst case isn’t always as bad as it seems. That’s what disappoints me about Papers, Please: every motivation and menace is simply implied to exist, and mostly left to your imagination. Going by that standard, California must be barely a step below Nazi Germany if the amount of paperwork involved in ANYTHING here is any indication. The regime which you really never see, and can only assume is evil because they keep adding more paperwork for you to sort through.
What’s happening is we’re going to take you into the back room and introduce you to the science of ballistic propulsion.Īnd while this is going on, a revolutionary group occasionally drops in soliciting your help in undermining the system and over throwing the regime. If the paperwork is good, you send them through. Or sometimes they’ll be missing a document altogether. For example, a city may be called Bumfuckistan, but on the paperwork, it’s listed as Bumfuchistan. Basically, the game revolves around checking all the paperwork for spelling mistakes or inconsistencies. I had to rely heavily on a rule book that had a map of all the local countries and their cities. A passport and ID for locals returning home because they’re fucking idiots and Glory to Arstotzka! There’s no tutorial, just some less than thorough static instruction screens that originally left me feeling unimpressed. A passport and an entry pass for foreigners. Just a few documents per person at the start. One by one, people come up to your booth presenting their immigration papers. You never see your character’s face, or learn his name.
If you’ve been living under a rock, the basic idea is you work as an immigration inspector for a fictionalized version of a cold-war era communist dictatorship. People were using terms like “nobody would have ever tried a game like this before indies” or “it uses video games as a medium for social commentary like no game ever has.” While they did that, I’m thinking to myself, we’re talking about a fucking paperwork simulator, aren’t we?Īnd yeah, we are, but that grossly oversimplifies thing. Then I did my first Steam review a few weeks ago, and with it, instantaneously, dozens of readers started pestering me for my opinion on Papers, Please. I did play a little of Papers, Please but it didn’t grab me immediately, and since Jerry did it, I figured I had no reason to go back to it.
By that point, I was still mostly focused on XBLIG and hadn’t even done a single PC review yet. Assuming it does.įormer IGC writer Jerry, aka Indie Gamer Guy, tackled today’s game nearly a year ago. But really, this review is being done for the benefit of people who have already played the game and just want to hear my opinion on here and see where Papers, Please lands on the Leaderboard.