Developer: Lucas Pope
Steam Deck Compatibility?: Verified
Rrp: £6.99 (Gog.com, Humble and Steam)
It feels strange to play this game after having played Not Tonight, because Papers, Please came out five years before Not Tonight and as such it feels relatively… sparse comparitively. That isn’t to say that the game is bad it’s just that by comparison it feels like it lacks something. What I can say though is that playing this felt like playing an important piece of gaming history.
Of course, Lucas Pope has moved onto bigger and better things, such as Return of the Obra Dinn and whatever he has in the works next.
For those unfamiliar Papers, Please simulates the act of checking the paperwork of people as they attempt to cross the border into the glorious (and fictional) country of Arstotzka. Each day the act of doing this job will get more and more complex with new rules adding to or even superseding old ones. It starts off easily enough, check the persons photo ID, the expiry date and country of origin and accept or deny them as appropriate. But that quickly spirals as you soon have to start checking issuing cities, foreign passes, lack of documentation and of course the occasional bribe.
All of this is while under the pressure of time, you can only do so much during your working hours and you are paid by how many people you process in that time. Suddenly those bribes start looking appealing, especially with those bills to pay and a family to feed.
This isn’t a simply game about performing an ever increasingly difficult bureaucratic task, there’s a larger plot that slowly appears that you interact with through the choices you make. Who you let through and when makes all the difference.
