10 Video Game Decisions You Immediately Regret Making
1. Almost Everything In Papers, Please
Lucas Pope's outstanding Papers, Please is a dystopian document thriller, which makes bureaucracy anything but boring. You wake up one typically grey day in the Eastern Bloc-chic country of Arstotzka, with a letter on your uncarpeted floor congratulating you on winning October's labour lottery: starting immediately, you'll be working as an immigration inspector at the newly opened Grestin Border Checkpoint.
Ostensibly, the aim of Papers, Please is to check passports against an ever-mutating series of rules, granting admission to those who meet the requirements. But it's not as simple as that; you're repeatedly forced to consider your humanity, making excruciating decisions to deny desperate individuals entry on the basis of a technicality or overly officious and often overtly unfair new regulations. It's a constant struggle of sending your conscience to the back of the line behind your family.
Even when the choice seems a no-brainer, Papers, Please has a habit of kicking you in the teeth and the knackers. During your first few days on the job, women hand the inspector a flyer for an East Grestin brothel called The Pink Vice. Some time later, another woman hands you the same flyer - slipped within is a note imploring you to deny entry to a man in line named Dari Ludum, who she fears will force her and her sister to work at the brothel.
When Ludum steps forward, his papers check out. Even if you deny him entry - and accept the citation which follows - a headline in the paper several days later reports that several of the Pink Vice's dancers have been found dead. It's the unrelentless, dehumanising suffocation of oppression in microcosm.