Try describing this game to someone unfamiliar with video games, and they'll say to you that it sounds like a job more than a game - a really depressing job. It's a fair point, considering your role as a border patrol passport officer in a fictional Soviet satellite state, and even the screenshots of Papers, Please make it look like a terminally bleak experience. But throw into the mix the fact that you have a family to feed, that there's a secret organisation trying to bring down the government, and that each day on the job faces you with fascinating moral dilemmas about who to let in to Arstotzka, who to turn away, and who to detain, and it becomes one of the most compelling, sparingly designed games in recent memory. Do you let in the lady who's trying to escape from a drug trafficker, or do you detain her so you get more money to take home to your impoverished family? As well as the excellent stories and multiple narrative paths the game can take, there's also a pleasure to keeping your desk organised in such a way that your passport-checking efficiency is at its highest, which becomes harder to do the more bureaucratic roadblocks get put in place by the government each day. Papers, Please is replayable, bleak, and in its own grey, eastern-bloc way, kind of beautiful.
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
