WORDS Eoin Moore
The idea of processing hundreds of refugees and immigrants through an Eastern Bloc border checkpoint isn’t a particularly enjoyable one. Inspecting passports, health certificates, Personal IDs, and a menagerie of other forms of documentation against one another in search of the slightest discrepancy doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend one’s free time. Working as a pawn in the grand scheme of a totalitarian dictatorship while encountering the grim tales of other souls just as unfortunate as yourself is not a typical video game premise. However, Papers, Please by Lucas Pope is anything but typical, and it is also an immersive, gripping, and heartbreaking work of art.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the vast majority of the time spent playing Papers, Please will be in the booth, comparing documents against one another. This simple puzzle mechanic is coupled with a daily time limit which constantly ticks away in the bottom corner. In order to pay rent, purchase food, and support a family, every day people must be processed as fast and efficiently as possible. A decent performance ensures remaining above the breadline (albeit slimly), however, making a single mistake means losing the money that could have been made from that person. Accumulative mistakes will result in higher penalties, penalties with severe consequences. As the game progresses, and more and more arbitrary rules are created, the game becomes an incredibly tense experience. It is a testament to the creator that the balancing of such simple mechanics can make the double-checking of forms – an act which is inherently slow, repetitive, and monotonous – so immersive and engaging.
The plot, characters, and atmosphere of Papers, Please are conveyed almost entirely through the people who appear in the booth. These countless, desperate individuals must leave their futures, their happiness, and sometimes their very lives in your hands. The game will force decisions which will affect these people tremendously many times over its course, and such decisions must be made in a matter of seconds, lest more time and money which your family need be wasted.
Most games offer a very superficial concept of morality. Generally, they reduce goodness and badness to a moral choice and, for the most part, these choices are easily made. One of Lucas Pope’s greatest achievements in this game is seamlessly interweaving gameplay and morality, while also making doing the “right” thing far more strenuous than simply selecting a dialogue option or passing an arbitrary skill check.
With such high stakes and limitations, there simply is not the freedom to be the good guy every time. Even being the good guy some of the time can cost dearly: letting through the kindly old man who needs medical attention across the border will cost money that pays for the food on your children’s plates. After a few hours of play, refusing such pleas becomes mundane; by taking away time to dwell on possible actions the game effectively warps the player into a cog of its terrible, authoritarian machine. Eventually, the game begins to reward extra, much-needed cash for not only refusing people with forged passports but also activating the alarm and having them detained. Here, the game offers surprises to the player by showing just how willing one is to go for the sake of self-preservation. Watching these people getting dragged away into the large, grey interrogation building — and knowing that they will never come out again — is a horrifying prospect, and yet it could happen at every available opportunity. In this game, moral choices only exist to display the dehumanising effects of desperation in a cruel and unfair world.
Unfairness sticks out as the most important concept in this game. The game exists in an unfair world, where learning to survive in unfair, imbalanced conditions is key. Even playing by the rules and doing a good job can result in punishing twists of fate. This is the fate that is shared with the hundreds waiting in the cold outside the booth, and instead of breeding sympathy this shared misfortune will more often than not lead to exploitation and disregard for humanity in exchange for self-protection. In this way, the game presents a bleak portrait of life in an unequal society, and not only illustrates this fact but makes the player an active cog in the cycle of corruption and abuse which inevitably follows, something that could only be achieved through the medium of video-games.
Papers, Please is an invitation into a world with no room for heroes or paragons, only survivors. It is a groundbreaking, emotional journey which, while not necessarily being enjoyable, will move players to their core.
Papers, Please, is available on Steam for PC and Mac.
