Papers Please Is Not What I Expected (And I Mean That in a Good Way)

Right so I need to be honest here. I put off playing this for years because every time someone mentioned Papers Please I just thought "its a game about stamping passports, how good can it actually be." And I feel a bit daft about that now because turns out its one of the best things Ive played in ages.

Papers Please. Game of the year 2013. You play a border inspector in a fictional Soviet-style country called Arstotzka. People come to your booth, you check their documents, you stamp them approved or denied. Thats it. Thats the game.

Except its absolutely not just that.

The first thing that gets you is how steep it is at the start. Day one you're just matching names to passports. Fine. Day two they add entry permits. Day three its work passes and ID supplements and weight discrepancies and suddenly your desk looks like a conspiracy board from a crime drama. I was properly sweating by about day four, trying to cross-reference three documents at once while the clock ticked down.

But heres the thing, you learn. Your brain starts to pattern match. By about day eight or nine I was spotting forged seals without even thinking about it. That learning curve is one of the most satisfying things Ive felt in a game for a long time.

And then the story kicks in and everything gets complicated in a completely different way.

People start telling you things at the booth. A woman says her husband just went through and please let her follow him, but her papers are wrong. A bloke slips you a note saying theres a resistance movement. Someone hands you documents that are clearly fake but they're fleeing something horrible and you just. You sit there with the stamp in your hand going "what do I actually do here."

I'm a bit embarrassed to say how much it got to me tbh. Its pixel art. Its a game about paperwork. But I proper felt it when I had to turn someone away knowing what might happen to them. The game just pokes at your sense of right and wrong in this really quiet, really effective way.

And you cant save everyone because if you make mistakes they dock your pay and you cant afford to heat your flat and your family gets sick. So every act of kindness has a cost. Every time you bend the rules for someone, your kid might go cold that night. Its brutal.

Then out of nowhere theres these mini game sections where you're suddenly using a tranquilizer gun or a sniper rifle during an attack on the border. Completely caught me off guard the first time. Proper heart-in-mouth stuff after hours of careful document checking.

The cold war setting is done really well too. Everything feels authentically grim in that specific 80s Soviet way. The propaganda posters, the grey concrete, the way the guards talk. Its immersive in a way I genuinely didnt expect from a game that looks like it was made in MS Paint.

I played about an hour and a half last night which is basically unheard of for me on a weeknight. Kids were asleep by half eight for once and I just kept going. "One more day" I kept saying. Same energy as "one more turn" in Civ except each day is like ten minutes.

Cant recommend it enough. If you havent played it, play it. If you think it sounds boring, I thought that too and I was wrong. Glory to Arstotzka.

Papers Please on Steam