8 Video Games That Did More With Less

Papers, Please is a game that could've potentially been a preachy disaster were it designed differently, but developer Lucas Pope had the good sense to appreciate that a no-frills, monotony-heavy approach was precisely what it needed.

This is a game where players take control of a border-crossing immigration officer in a fictional dystopia, and their sole job involves sitting at a desk and reviewing travellers' documents while satisfying the increasingly bureaucratic rules of the state.

It's a shining example of a game whose straightforward mechanics belie its loftier thematic concerns, as it asks the player to make difficult choices, balancing empathy for the average citizen with their own need for survival.

Pope himself has said that he consciously chose a simple retro art style and didn't even consider voice work or cinematic cutscenes, as he felt those elements would force him down a more overt storytelling path whose themes would be more blatant and less interesting.

Instead, by focusing on the repetition of processing travellers' documents, we're able to hone in on the finer details of an interaction, where even minor factors can be surprisingly significant.

What Papers, Please lacks in visual flair or technical polish it more than compensates for with its emotional complexity and bluntly effective examination of life under totalitarianism.