Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the new regulations, you can call in your first candidate from the seemingly endless line of immigrants either passing through or looking for a new home. Maybe if you’re lucky, your superior will visit you to tell you of a distinguished visitor en route or hand you an award for your adequacy. After that long miserable walk to work in the freezing cold, you’ll find a new memo on your desk from the powers-that-be, detailing any new immigration rules. You’re typical work day is, frankly, quite horrible. As the lucky “winner” of the labor lottery, you’ve been assigned to man the border checkpoint and scour through countless passports and entry waivers as the never-ending line of people wait eagerly to cross over. You’ll play as an ordinary citizen from Arstozka, a fictional country that would have fit in perfect during the USSR’s last dying breaths, as 1982 draws to a close. Papers Please doesn’t cast you as a hero of any sort. Why in the blue hell do I love this game so much? Papers, Please doesn’t make me feel good about myself and though it let me walk away feeling accomplished, it doesn’t even necessarily feel like fun half the time. On the other hand, if I happen to hit the button to have her arrested and thrown in some ungodly gulag that I’ll never see, there may be another five spot waiting for me at the end of the day. If the lady in front of me gets through our borders with a passport that spells her name wrong, I’m the one who has to pay the fine, and my family at home is already cold and starving. The only real gameplay is reading through paperwork looking for minute discrepancies as the laws of my home country get more and more convoluted. The low fi audio barely edges out the true 8 bit visuals, which feel as if they’re 30 years late.

Papers please passport stamps