Picking Up Steam: Papers, Please (PC)
Papers, Please is a game about playing as a poor man working at a border checkpoint for a totalitarian regime heavily inspired by real life Soviet Bloc countries. Your only actions taken in this game will be reviewing paperwork to approve or deny entry to the overwhelming lines of people wanting to enter the country, your work often involving such minor considerations as noticing typos or small factual inconsistencies. It’s not the type of game that sounds enjoyable to play, and yet, it is remarkably compelling because of the context around your simple work day.
To serve the nation of Arstotzka, you must be accurate in who you allow into the country. If you make a mistake, it will be figured out and you can be fined for your error. You have a family of four at home who all need heating and food, but you are only paid when you properly process an immigrant, something that emphasizes that you do your work properly, but then you actually speak with the people trying to enter Arstotzka. Will you remain a loyal servant to your demanding government when you learn someone might die if you don’t let them into the country? Do you even believe this person who might be saying whatever it takes to get in? Perhaps a nice bribe from a bad person could make you look the other way because you need that money to help your family, or maybe your bleeding heart in helping too many good people through might get you in trouble with your overseers and lead to you ending up in prison yourself. This is where Papers, Please provides the powerful moral conundrums that make it such a fascinating play, the paperwork your way of interacting with these difficult choices as you try to weigh unknown factors with the incredible pressures of being a bureaucrat in such a dour situation.
The entirety of Papers, Please takes place across a 30 day period at the Grestin Border Checkpoint, and while that may make it seem like there’s a set course for events, there are quite a few premature ends to be found if you do get a bit too flagrant in acting against the wishes of the oppressive Arstotzkan regime or can’t keep up with the demands at home. You need that income from working your job, although you can sometimes make the rough decisions to cut out heat or even skip meals for a time if you feel you need to save that little bit of cash between work days. Balancing your income can be made even rougher by the high amount of terrorist attacks taking place, a work day ending prematurely should one occur. It’s hard to say if they’re freedom fighters or people with grudges, but the game deliberately wants you to feel that conflicted sentiment. Perhaps these are people trying to break Arstotzka free of its corrupt and fickle fascist rulers, but their actions still mean your son may end up sick on his birthday because you couldn’t feed him well enough the day before. You don’t actually get to see your family at all though, their condition just showing up on a sterile page after the work day when you are balancing your expenditures making it perhaps too easy to treat them more as indicators of success rather than beloved relatives. At the same time, perhaps making them faceless is just another test of your moral character. It would be so easily to let a few family members pass and afford the nicer living quarters for those still alive, but what would that say about you for thinking of it as such a calculated choice rather than a compassionate one?
During a normal work day, you technically only have one objective. You call people up to the checkpoint, look over their paperwork, and stamp their passport to either let them into the country or send them back out. The world of Papers, Please is rather grim in appearance, dull coloration, weary looking immigrants, and voices that sound more like grumbles than real words. When things begin, you don’t have much to look over, Papers, Please easing you into its paperwork vetting gradually so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Very basic information is tested like cross-referencing two documents to make sure the names and ID numbers are the same, but you also have to make sure IDs were issued in valid cities and soon new considerations are added like verifying a person’s reasons for entering the country. Things can even start to get a bit invasive when you start having to check suspicious people’s fingerprints or even take photos of their naked bodies to check for hidden contraband, the game letting you disable nudity if that feels like a bit too much in a game that can already feel quite bleak. As your workspace gets cluttered with all the reference material you need to remain accurate and the increasing amount of paperwork immigrants need to present, you do start to really resent the way Arstotzka operates. One day a country sanctions them so they ban all entrants from that country, than tomorrow everything is fine between the two again so you remove that rule. For a while they ask for all immigrants to have entry tickets, then entry permits replace those tickets, then they finally consolidate two other documents into one but that means you have to get used to the new format while under a time pressure since you don’t get paid for any work after a set time on each in-game day.
Thankfully, the slow rollout actually makes things quite manageable despite the introduction of new rules and shifts in requirements. You come to know valid issuing cities by heart, you become swifter at laying out the paperwork in a convenient manner, and you can even pay a little bit for helpful shortcuts like bookmarking the pages with specific info in your reference book. In fact, it can actually get a fair bit fun to try and hunt down errors, almost like playing a spot-the-difference game but with a bit more complexity. There are plenty of people trying to get into Arstotzka who don’t have some heart-wrenching tale tied to them, in fact, there is even a recurring comedic character with hilariously bad paperwork who brings some joy when he drops by. The human interest tales are what add the important additional layer of meaning to your job, but there are enough regular folks where you don’t need to consider the broader implications of approving or rejecting them to give you some breathing room. At the same time, near the end of the game, it can start feel like there are a few too many generic people trying to enter the country. You start recognizing the things they say when confronted with an error with a paperwork because you’ve heard six other generic characters say it, and the Endless mode where all you do is paperwork doesn’t seem too interesting of a prospect compared to a story mode that throws in deeper considerations on top of the proofreading work.
Papers, Please does have quite a few endings, some of them only light alterations of each other, but others can feel like interesting payoffs to the different approaches a player may take to their job. Early on, you will get contacted by a resistance group who wants you to help them, but that raises some interesting questions. It’s not like the guy at the border checkpoint will get the glory of taking down a brutal totalitarian regime, so helping them and potentially losing your family for it could seem foolish. At the same time, even if they do one day free the country, they might not remember the guy who turned down a few of their passports. You can keep your head down or help these people out, but will your overseers notice your intention or just figure it for a normal error if you’re subtle about it? You can actually make occasional errors without getting fined to keep the game from being too frustrating, so letting some people slip through to help the cause or just try to make a few people’s lives better like a husband and wife who would be separated if you were a stickler can be justified. Papers, Please isn’t a game without hope, you can do good in your position, but it’s not the tale of the grand hero who will show up in the history books. It tests things like small scale empathy, of weighing the needs of the many to the needs of the few, and since you’re only going to be at your checkpoint, you often don’t even get to see the payoff to certain actions. The daily newspaper might mention it if it makes a big enough splash, but Papers, Please is a down to earth and grounded look at how the life of an everyman might be under a despotic government. You’re a cog in the machine, but machines need their gears to work, so you can have an impact on this country, on its people, on your own life, should you choose to exert the small bit of control you have wisely and carefully.
THE VERDICT: Papers, Please pulls off an impressive trick. It makes vetting paperwork sometimes entertaining on its own merits thanks to a smart rollout of considerations and your gradual built-up skill, but it steeps that seemingly banal task in some compelling moral quandaries. The safety and well-being of you and your family must be weighed against the desire to do right for others seeking safety or their loved ones. You can’t be sure how much you can trust the Arstotzkan regime to reward diligent work, but you can’t necessarily assume a resistance movement will succeed in its aims either. Your work at the border checkpoint takes on a deeper and fascinating meaning that still feels remarkably realistic, Papers, Please more than a game about just spotting typos and errors on forms.
And so, I give Papers, Please for PC…
A FANTASTIC rating. Papers, Please does mostly strike its delicate balance well. Not all of the paperwork should have the crushing weight of a tough decision riding on your choice to let someone in or not, but it can also feel a bit too packed with regular people as you sometimes wait for the next compelling situation to arise. The game can get a bit pesky with some of the times it will fault you, expecting you to object to a person’s listed sex on their ID card when the stylized characters can make parsing such things just by a face not so easy. Papers, Please is also not always rewarding to return to in order to see the other endings because of their similarity and the normal stretches of processing involved, although it at least saves after each day and puts them in a timeline so if you do need or want to jump back a few days it’s not too tedious. However, one run through Papers, Please is likely going to be a riveting time, the player able to get into their role pretty well but they are also presented with situations that exist beyond practical video game considerations. You aren’t here to “win” per se, but there are good things you can do and ways you can make the lives of characters better. At the same time, getting sloppy or ignoring your spot in society can have harsh repercussions, the player needing to be aware of the dangers at their back. Short stories of characters you spend a little time with arise like one of the armed guards along the border who talks to you from time to time, and there are times your heart and mind will struggle to figure out what to do, all while needing to consider the time since you need to process people quickly to get a decent paycheck. Papers, Please mostly avoids being stressful in abrasive ways, it knows not to ask too much of you at any one time and when things are complicated, you’ve been prepared to handle them.
Papers, Please is interactive fiction, the kind of story that only works as well as it does because of its medium of choice. A 10 minute short film exists based on this game dramatizing some of its memorable moments and is quite good for portraying the human experience as well, but it also makes definitive choices in its narrative. In the game Papers, Please, the multiple endings benefit it because a nicer ending can still be made of tough choices, or an unfortunate end built on good intentions, but neither precludes the other. Life and its issues are nuanced, layered, and complicated, and you can’t always know the consequences of even your simpler actions like letting a mother see her son. Letting her through can mean the world to her… or maybe she has a bomb strapped to her and knows someone will let her through with a sob story. How far should empathy go when there are so many things to consider, all just as a working man who’s meant to be processing paperwork? It is a game that lets you decide its emotional toll, the poignancy of its messages coming from the fact you’ll always be the one to stamp that passport, the weight of so many people’s futures tied to a menial job that still holds incredible power.