9 Video Games That Played With Your Emotions

Papers, Please uniquely puts you in the role of a passport immigration officer, working at a border of a fictional war-torn European Bloc state called Arstotzka. Residents are desperate to cross the border out of Arstotzka, but only certain people who meet the state government criteria are allowed through.

You must enforce these rules in order to get paid for your work. Fail, and your family starves to death.

Because yes, Papers, Please really is that dark.

The game then plays out like a Tetris puzzler, as you have to quickly evaluate the case of each citizen at the border and decide if they're allowed to cross. But these aren't geometric shapes, they're people, and their individual stories become more apparent as you progress through the game. You come to realise that the game unfairly rewards bureaucracy and paperwork over the lives of these people, and that's a heart-breaking revelation.

Papers, Please is not far away from being a Milgram experiment. It's a game where your empathy gets beaten down by an authoritarian figure, and their unflinching insistence to complete endless tasks for them.