True creative inspiration has a habit of leading to uncultivated territory. Not long ago, a wall was dashed asunder and a communist union was dissolved; now, that mark on history has been married with ex-Naughty Dog developer Lucas Pope’s tense experiences with international checkpoints and has given the gaming world Papers, Please. What makes this game feel so audacious is in how counterintuitive it acts with many of its familiar gameplay characteristics. Binary choices are the core of this title, yet the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ choices proffered are behind approving or denying one soul’s ingress into a country. The fundamentals of the game are crafted with such a risk/reward system that winning is something to strive for, even though the gameplay is only draining bureaucratic work and—apropos of the subject matter—success never feels celebrated. The bleak backdrop provides a thematic unity between the inter-personal stories experienced throughout the game, the over-bearing amount of power to affect the lives of so many, and the freedom afforded to be a part in all of it, despite the player's own role being restrained behind a desk.
You play as an immigration officer at a border checkpoint of a fictionalized, impoverished Soviet territory named Arstotzka. Everything takes place behind one screen segmented into three parts: an overhead view of the border checkpoint, a first-person view of the immigrant processing area, and a close-up of your small desk. Those attempting to enter into the country will give their paperwork while you scan over all of their required documents to check for discrepancies, forgeries, etc. and decide whether or not to allow them into the country. That’s basically the core mechanic here: you’re just doing monotonous paperwork. And as the new set of rules and regulations are handed down as time progresses, managing all of these new documents that clutter your desk becomes a secondary goal to allowing or denying immigrants to pass. But out of this new breed of ‘work games’ that have been releasing recently, Papers, Please feels so much more rewarding than expected due to its polish and the stories tied into it.
When it comes to the game’s visual and sound design, it does a really good job of putting function ahead of glamor. The faces and the pixel-bits of those waiting outside are all presented in a dun color palette, but that austere, Eastern Bloc art style works with the theme. The low fidelity of the MS-DOS aesthetic does a superb job of filtering out all but the necessary visual information as well. The sound design is also very satisfying thanks to the crisp aural queues when moving various items around and the satisfying “thwack!” when stamping passports. Plus, the sound of the typewriter printing out citations for incorrectly approving/denying someone's passport is absolutely irritating and makes those slip-ups all the more painful. Even background cadences not dedicated to the gameplay, like calling the next person in line in this unpleasant alien language, just punctuate the lugubrious atmosphere of this day job and this little sliver of a fictionalized country.
Beyond the mechanics, there are many stories being told, some big and some small. Throughout the course of the campaign, there’s a drip-feed of different characters asking for requests when they’re at their most vulnerable. Some people just carry one-off stories or ones that last several sessions which will challenge your morals and your outlook of this autonomous country’s overbearing policies. It may be as simple as reuniting two lovers or letting someone who's smuggling medicine into the country to pass through. These opportunities to do this must be carefully considered since an invisible supervisor only allows two warning citations per day before beginning to take away earned daily wages, money desperately needed in order to ensure your family survives another day. With all these factors considered, each workday becomes a balance between the privations of your family’s well-being, conniving with vulnerable strangers who’ve asked for your help, and the genuine trepidation accompanied with trying to process every non-special person in a hasty fashion. What this all translates to is Papers, Please being one of the most strangely engrossing games I’ve ever played because of this marriage in contextual factors.
There are branching story paths that can lead to a total of twenty different endings dependent upon your speed in getting people through, the moments you’ve genuinely failed, and the moments you bended the rules for someone. Eventually, encounters with diplomats and a revolutionary outfit present some decisions with great historical weight. Some recurring characters will show up at your desk enough to have their own personal arcs. Even down to the minute details, like the surrounding countries of Arstotzka or what trinkets hang on your wall, there’s an overwhelming sense of dedication to making the desperation of this situation feel so realized.
What melds all of the mechanical and contextual components so well is by the uniqueness of this game. There’s not even a dedicated genre to define this sort of title. Pope may call it a “dystopian document thriller,” but perhaps I liken it to something more along the lines of what other reviewers have coined as a “bureaucracy-‘em-up.” It tells a sinister political satire within the framework of the tedium of bureaucratic paper-pushing; and yet, that experimental way of telling a familiar story seems perfectly natural for this backdrop. Whatever genre it’s going to fall into, Papers, Please succeeds at providing a window into a familiar and all-too-real subject matter in a new, clever way to the gaming medium.
Despite its overwhelming success, this isn’t to say it's without flaws. For one, the storytelling fails to put much of an emphasis behind your family. In comparison to all the powerful moments seen with complete strangers, it’s a shame to see the status of your family be relegated to informative text after each day’s work. Even a recurring clip of waking up and staring into their bedrooms could have amplified my happiness in seeing their ugly caricatures or my sorrow in seeing that empty bed. There are also some minor design choices that seem a bit irrelevant, such as some of the booth upgrades. These are really minor quibbles, when it’s said and done.
But there's something about this game that feels like it's out to get you. "NEXT!" you scream for the following passerby through. Double-checking, triple-checking, QUADRUPLE-checking each passport for any errors. Things go along as you're hording each dollar like a miser. Then, the first red ticket begins clickety-clacking through the printer! Tension begin to broil and you're now hurrying faster to get enough to eek out another day. Slowly going, slowing going along. "Oh come the **** on!" you say seeing the next red ticket coming up based on the most minor of infractions. The next man to come into the booth offers you a hefty sum to sneak him over the border. You can FEEL the attendant watching you. You take the offer and reason with yourself, boiling over as the third red ticket comes up, disputing "well, if this stupid job actually paid me to maintain a family of four perhaps I'd be more duteous in my tasks!" The conditions are terrible, this country stinks, and I can't ta...
*ahem*
>_>
<_<
Well…that was going a bit too far. But that sort of frustration encapsulates what Papers, Please is so easily capable of being once the rhythm of rigmarole starts to develop.
Being an aforementioned work game, this is definitely a case where a concept like “fun factor” can’t adequately describe what it does so well. Personally, I believe another term fits into the kinds of games that are more riveting than pleasurable: engagement. It’s important to make that distinction because the mileage for many may vary here. By and large, the core mechanic is all there is to it for the four-hour single player campaign, and more with an unlocked Endless Mode. So, that initial off-beat appeal and humor about this concept does eventually wear off and is replaced by the glooms of actually feeling like immigration paperwork; with that considered though, having that singular focus is really the whole point and works to amplify every other element.
It's in that laser focus of Papers, Please that shows how interactive storytelling can really be done so differently in this sort of medium. Instead of implementing the story via non-interactive cutscenes or environmental storytelling, the story moves forward only through player input. The whole gameplay concept acts as a device for important decisions, but in a non-traditional fashion. Every important contextual decision of maintaining your family or choosing 'yes' or 'no' to important story arcs at the checkpoint is treated like tokens and those decisions also act as a means of acquiring in-game currency. From start to finish, everything within this story is only focused on what decisions YOU have made and thus leaving you to ponder what those implications meant. It's a blank slate that's able to leave the inferences of your decisions up to your own experience while also making powerful statements about real-world issues, past and present.
Papers, Please succeeds at being engaging by implanting an innovative gameplay system that encapsulates the unremitting anxiety and poverty of an entire era. It pulls you into an allegorical world with your own predispositions and has the power to make you think about many of your actions in ways even the biggest-budgeted contemporaries can't pull off. It’s able to be funny, insightful, tragic, and relevant and embody the meaning of its time and place down to the very mechanics.
coolbeans’ *Certified FresH* Badge
coolbeans’ 2013 Game of the Year Nominee
Stop (or profit off) your border's contraband!
BLG writes: "Dystopian games are more relevant than ever in a day and age when the world seems to be getting progressively bleaker with each passing year. But dystopian fiction, in general, isn’t trying to make us depressed by showing us how much worse things could get. Rather, the point is (usually) to serve as a cautionary tale, and there’s perhaps no tale more cautionary than George Orwell’s 1984."
A game that should absolutely be on this list is Disco Elysium. That game is wildly deep in the field of its take on social issues, politics, religion, morality, and the internal struggles of the human psyche.
Still haven't finished it but Disco Elysium is really great. I love the dark sense of humour.
I love dystopian settings in general. We happy few is an excellent game. It is basically a mash up of 1984 and the other dystopian classic Brave New World. The drug 'Joy' is essentially 'Soma' from Aldous Huxley's novel.
Orwell was surprisingly engrossing. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected. I bought the sequel on Steam but haven't gotten around to playing it yet.
Don't need a game to experience Orwell. Real life follows it pretty well.
It is not only through paperwork and armed guards that Askrokia maintains its power, but from the way it controls the player’s limited and valuable time.
Hope everyone enjoyed the review. Please feel free to leave any comments and/or questions below.
Now that I've finished TLOU, I'd definitely like to do another round of back-to-back reviews of titles by one developer in the near future, like I did with Bioware and the ME series. Since I have a functional PS3 again, those reviews will certainly be mixed in more often.
Well I think you pretty much covered everything beans. I have to agree though, it was a great game.
...what? Were you expecting some half-assed, backhanded less than funny joke? Yeah, well I couldn't think of one.
Glory to Arstotzka!
This game really needs more people to talk about it since it was one of the few that was different from other games. The unique thing is that they made the boring work in real life to be a fun video game with Papers, Please. I also like how it touched to moral choices on which people to deny from entering or just let him/her inside for any sort of reason.
Thanks for the review :D
PS: Damn Kolechians in this game...*Sigh*
I downloaded the game after reading this review and I have to say, it is completely spot on. Papers, Please is a horribly depressing creation that I simply cannot tear myself away from. I was only able to last about four days/missions or so before my character's family died before I could earn enough money required to purchase enough medicine for the lot of them. Mind you, that was before I realised that I get paid based on how many immigrants I correctly approve/deny and not on the general day. I'll ensure to be a bit quicker on my next playthrough.
There's something gritty and dystopian about the game that makes me incredibly uncomfortable and inspires me to be more empathetic to people in the world because you never really know what they're going through until you walk a mile in their shoes. It's also one of those situations where I wish to never see myself, my family or people I care about (paired with being forced to survive in a zombie apocalypse or evacuated from a danger zone within a city and separated.)
Papers, Please has taught me quite a lot of life lessons in only a short while, one of those including morality; choosing to reunite two lovers at the cost of a citation or pay decrease. Some things are more important in life; I just wish the protagonist's family didn't have to suffer for making a morally correct decision.