One of the seminal entries in the "games Brian Griffin would make" genre, except the surrounding game is decent.

Papers, Please was a game that I really enjoyed when it came out, and I think the overall gameplay loop and presentation carry the game in a way that similar disasters like Not For Broadcast can't. Unlike that game, I really enjoyed most of the cast and following their ongoing stories.

The thing that brings those stories down is that the narrative is tied to a very confused and outright reactionary view of the eastern bloc. It's to be expected, I don't think Lucas Pope mentally has left the suburbs of Virginia since his birth, but the Red Dawn tier depiction of a vaguely leftwing, vaguely slavic rogue state that willingly deprives its citizens of basic needs based on the market is a disingenuous and purposeful political statement. It's also one that's very hard to believe once you have a basic understanding of the history of these regions, and going back to the game even four years after its launch, this stood out to me.

It's also just hard to find the despotic nature of the setting that gripping compared to the immigration system of the United States, which is significantly darker and more cruel than anything depicted in this game. We have the secret police, we have the "work or die" economic system, we even go a step further and have outright concentration camps. These weren't recent developments within the writer's lifetime either. He was around for the formation of ICE! There's a version of this game, if you absolutely have to set it in the "evil gommunism" of the vague east, that cuts so much deeper than this game comes close to approaching.

It really fucking sucks, because if this game wasn't such a cowardly and confused mess of a setting, it would make the individual stories of the regulars you meet at your desk job so much more engaging.

Todo ambiente político e tenso transformado em um jogo extremamente divertido que te leva a dúvidas morais

Um protagonista de poucas palavras mas que me causou mais impacto que muito personagem com bíblias de história e diálogo

Um jogo que desafia a ideia do certo e errado com maestria

have some nostalgia for this from watching youtubers play it when it came out and i came back to it because of a recommendation from a friend. And I don't really know how to feel about it. I think the gameplay is very well designed, the individual character writing is really solid, and some of the moral choices are well set up, for example after finishing the first day and seeing that my entire family had trackers for if they were fed and healthy that depended on how much money I made I was like damn so it's going to be THAT kind of game. At the same time I think there's only so far you can go with this gimmick before it becomes too complicated and annoying so the complexity of the systems kind of plateau near the end. My biggest issue of all is that as a political statement it just has nothing to say, it uses this vague "eastern communist state" setting as set dressing and not much else. All it really had to offer was "this is a bad country and the border system turns lots of people away" repeated in different ways across 31 days; a reminder of that weird time in the mid 2010s where the american internet was obsessed with the soviet union for some reason. And I know that you're not supposed to feel like a good person but putting people in a scanner because they don't match up with the gender on their passport felt Very Bad to me, especially since it wasn't interrogated morally by the game the same way that other bad actions were. Idk, I can see why it's well liked but I don't feel especially motivated to try and get the rest of the endings.