Paper’s Please

Paper’s Please is a game that shouldn’t work. At the core gampelay loop, it is simply you at a border checkpoint scanning people’s paperwork.  How the game manages to pull you in is how it pulls at your very core principles. How much of your humanity are you willing to give up in order to sustain your dying wife and starving child at home. The gameplay loop starts simple and grows over time. You have a certain set of orders to observe while checking immigrants documents to determine whether they are permitted entrance into the country. Turn away a valid visitor or let in someone with invalid permissions, and the little fax machine with make a loud abrasive note letting you know what you did wrong. This  results in a docking of your pay, which is criminally small as is. After a grueling day at work, your small income must be spent dividing your income amongst food, heat, rent, and entertainment. The game of course does not give you enough to sustain each, so you much juggle how to keep your family alive, while also making sure your job is secure. There is a strict time limit while working as well, so you must be quick while observing people.

What really drives home the game for me is the immigrants your observing. Increasingly desperate people with substories and the underlying plots that bring life to this dystopian communist society. A brewing terrorist sect from a neighboring country, families possibly being separated due to insufficient papers, sex slavery. These are just a few of the stories that you hear of when dealing with people at the border. Couple this with increasing difficulty with more and more papers and documentation needed, helps to make it a rising tension, as you make hard decisions all throughout the game.

The game drew me in a way that I wouldn’t expect. I usually use games as a form of escapism from the monotony of life, and suddenly I find myself in a game about sorting through documents? Despite this, the anxiety and growing tension that comes from the game made me feel actually uneasy about a game and the choices I was making. That alone is something to make it memorable to me. It may not be for everyone, but those that like to thing hard about the choices of what you do makes this game worth a look.