I've had Papers, Please on my wishlist for many years. Finally picked it up for very cheap recently as part of the game's 10 year anniversary. Playing it taught me that I've been 10 years late to the party.
In this game, you are an "Inspector" at the border to Aristotzka, and your job is to check entry documents of everyone trying to enter. At first, you grant entry to Aristotzkians and deny it to every foreigner, but with every passing day, new rules are added and present ones change. By Day 20+, passports can be forged, both natives and foreigners need multiple different entry forms, you check for fingerprints to confirm identities, search bodies to check for contraband, detain criminals and also take part in shady activities as part of the main story if you want. The main story takes a lot longer than I imagined based on the premise, but the game keeps presenting new challenges to keep things interesting.
Whether you will enjoy the game yourself depends on how you feel about the core gameplay loop. As someone who does enjoy doing "mundane" tasks like looking over passports for discrepancies, I've enjoyed Papers, Please's gameplay a lot. It also sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The number of times I made mistakes in this game is staggering. The game does a great job of making you feel and look dumb as hell. And it will happen to you often, simply because in the latter half of the story, there just is way too much to look out for that something small is tiny to slip by you. The only things I found a bit unfair were single letters being different in certain words (Citu instead of City is very hard to discern) and invalid height being a criteria too, since heights don't seem consistent enough.
There is also the part of the game being a low budget indie game. Not a bad thing, the game is a creative beauty, but the visual look is very simplistic and repetitive, there are very few sounds and tracks in the game, there are only a couple dozen faces in the game so they get repetitive too and all this combined adds to the repetitive feeling that comes up herre and there overall. This is one of those games though where a bigger budget wouldn't necessarily have done a whole lot for the overall experience relative to the potential income for the developer. As it stands, this is a very fun experience for the right player, a very unique experience no matter who you are (unless you're a border patrol agent irl) and one of the more creative games I've ever played. Check it out!
In this game, you are an "Inspector" at the border to Aristotzka, and your job is to check entry documents of everyone trying to enter. At first, you grant entry to Aristotzkians and deny it to every foreigner, but with every passing day, new rules are added and present ones change. By Day 20+, passports can be forged, both natives and foreigners need multiple different entry forms, you check for fingerprints to confirm identities, search bodies to check for contraband, detain criminals and also take part in shady activities as part of the main story if you want. The main story takes a lot longer than I imagined based on the premise, but the game keeps presenting new challenges to keep things interesting.
Whether you will enjoy the game yourself depends on how you feel about the core gameplay loop. As someone who does enjoy doing "mundane" tasks like looking over passports for discrepancies, I've enjoyed Papers, Please's gameplay a lot. It also sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The number of times I made mistakes in this game is staggering. The game does a great job of making you feel and look dumb as hell. And it will happen to you often, simply because in the latter half of the story, there just is way too much to look out for that something small is tiny to slip by you. The only things I found a bit unfair were single letters being different in certain words (Citu instead of City is very hard to discern) and invalid height being a criteria too, since heights don't seem consistent enough.
There is also the part of the game being a low budget indie game. Not a bad thing, the game is a creative beauty, but the visual look is very simplistic and repetitive, there are very few sounds and tracks in the game, there are only a couple dozen faces in the game so they get repetitive too and all this combined adds to the repetitive feeling that comes up herre and there overall. This is one of those games though where a bigger budget wouldn't necessarily have done a whole lot for the overall experience relative to the potential income for the developer. As it stands, this is a very fun experience for the right player, a very unique experience no matter who you are (unless you're a border patrol agent irl) and one of the more creative games I've ever played. Check it out!