Dealing with immigration: the best way to understand the word "bureaucracy"
Papers, Please puts you in the hotseat of an immigration officer in a fictional country of Arstotzka where you get to decide who gets in, and who doesn’t.
As you sit in your booth, you call people to show their papers. You check whether the names, serial numbers, dates and data match. If all is good, you can approve this person. If it isn’t, you deny or detain him or her, depending on the severity of the issue.
Detecting a discrepancy of wrong issuing city by cross-referencing your official handbook and a person's passport
There is a backstory to the game. It goes like this: a border has just open and you have been given the job as the one and only immigration officer in this border. For thirty days, you will go to work and every person you correctly approve or deny will reward you with money, along with bribes, bonuses and other one-time events.
You have a family to take care of, which will cost you money to upkeep due to rent, heat and food. Your efficacy at work will determine if they flourish or perish.
The game gets increasingly complicated. You start of dealing with two or three documents, but because of different world events such as terrorism, deteoriating relations between nations, and disease, you will increasingly need to deal with more paperwork, weapons and dilemmas.
A dilemma you will encounter: do you help your government or assist a clandestine anti-government group? Do you take bribes? Each choice you make will lead to a different ending, of which there are 20.
A miserable ending awaits if you make the wrong choices
The game runs very well on a netbook and you can probably play it with a trackpad should you wish. It is certainly advantageous to play with a mouse since speed is of the essence in this game.
The only issue is that you must play fullscreen, because windowed mode is way too big for a netbook’s display of 1024×600. Fullscreen resizes it down, but oddly, it will scale it down such that Papers, Please will only take up half the screen, leaving a substantial perimeter of black bars on all four sides as evident on the first two screenshots.
Papers, Please offers some of the best value for money and an addicting factor that is up there with highly rated regular games. You can play it through once to get the story, or you can play it again and again to experience the different endings. It’s fantastic.
Like
A unique game with a good replay value
Great storyline, thrilling endings
Fun because of the constantly changing environment
Dislike
Suboptimal fullscreen scaling
Verdict
Great fun, great value, good replay value.
Gameplay: Great!
Graphics smoothness: Excellent
Work needed to get game to play: None
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