Papers, Please Review

Papers, Please is an immigration simulator developed by Lucas Pope for the PC, Linux, and Mac. After winning the Labor Lottery, you are assigned a job as an immigration inspector at the Grestin Border Checkpoint in the fictional country of Arstotzka, and an apartment in East Grestin is provided for you and your family to reside in.

The game has two modes: story and endless. Story mode focuses on the events that take place in the month following the checkpoint's opening and features an amazing 20 possible endings. Endless is an unlockable mode that requires you to beat the story without losing your job and features three game types: Timed, Perfection, and Endurance.

The story revolves mostly around the relationship between Arstotzka and Kolechia. After a six-year war, the two neighboring countries still have unsolved problems regarding the influence over Grestin, a fictional Cold War Berlin.

Your job as inspector is to ensure that immigration law is enforced. This requires you to inspect everyone's documents passing through the checkpoint. Things start slow and easy, with everyone being granted access via a passport, so you'll just have to check the name, gender, and expiration date of said document. But as political tensions, epidemics, or terrorist attacks arise, more regulations will be put in place, which means more papers for you to inspect.

The main goal of the game is to earn enough each day for your family to survive. If you fail to pay for food and heat for your family members, they will get sick and eventually die. You earn money for each person you correctly process, but for each illegal immigrant that slips through the checkpoint, you receive an increasingly larger penalty (though you receive two free passes a day).

As the game progresses, you are given ways to make an extra buck, such as accepting bribes, doing favors, tranquilizing trespassers, detaining people, or even helping the revolutionary movement overthrow the corrupt government.

Graphically, the game is really simplistic and underwhelming, which would be a downside for most games. But since you'll have to deal with checking faces all the time, having simple graphics is actually a plus in this case.

The game does have some things that seem to have been overlooked. For instance, when you notice the picture in the documents doesn't match the person, and you inquire them about it, they will sometimes say that the years have been cruel, despite them looking younger now than in the past. Another small flaw is that the ID tickets and Access Permits describe some people as being overweight, even though their weight says something else. Fortunately, these are just small gripes that don't diminish the game's overall value.

Papers, Please is a unique game, and despite its simple premise, it isn't easy. You'll have a blast playing through all the different outcomes and even doing a bit of roleplaying here and there as you choose to either be a ruthless or a corrupt inspector. It has a dark and gritty world and succeeds in telling a compelling story without even using any voices, and for the price of $10, it's simply a game that you must experience.