Papers, Please - Simulator of Communism

I bet you've heard about this game because everyone is talking about it. The theme is brand new. You just hope the game is not as boring as it sounds, because all the time you are just sitting at the counter at the borders of the fictive, heavily communist, Arstotzka country to check passports. Well, not just passports. Papers in general.

"Oh, it sounds like fun! I have to play it!" You turn off your favorite game full of action and turn on Papers, Please just out of curiosity.

Plot

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As I mentioned in the introduction, throughout the game, your only goal is to feed your family by going to work every day. You are an immigration officer at the borders who must check the papers of people who want to enter Arstotzka. The more you check (correctly), the more money you get.

Well, family. I don't quite understand why I have to feed my mother in law and uncle, but whatever.

Does it still sound pretty boring? Well, you will be surprised (probably like me) but the game has plenty to offer.

Soundtrack

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It is not worth mentioning, because there is not any at all. The Arstotzka's melody can help you get into the atmosphere of the game, but only a few tones are played over and over again. Otherwise, you will encounter mainly repetitive sounds that will start to get on your nerves after an hour, and you will prefer to play without them.

And dialogues sound like this:

"Papers!"
"rewqrw"
"tretewr"
"werqtw"

Besides, you won't even be able to play the game for several hours, because you simply have to rest from all that stereotype time to time.

Gameplay

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The first game session was like this:

"WTF is this? WTF is that? WTF I should do?" ... "Inspection, where is the inspection, I just can't see it!?" ... "How am I supposed to know if it's a guy or a woman? The drawings are terrible!" ... "How Protocol Violated? Everything was OK!" ... "Omg, it's a terrible game, I won't play again."

There is no tutorial available, and you have to come up with the individual features and procedures yourself. Luckily, my bf already played the game, so he helped me a lot.

At the beginning of the day, you have available a newspaper and a book that tells you who can enter the country and who not. In the first days, you don't need to read the newspapers, but later, you'll find there faces of the wanted criminals, which you also need to control.

After studying the rules and preparing your cheat sheet, you can work. Call the next person using the megaphone. If the counter is empty, it displays "Next," another text indicates that the previous immigrant has not left yet.

The incoming person will put all the documents that will come to his mind on the table. Occasionally, some is missing. But that does not necessarily mean he doesn't have them. First you have to ask him. In the book, you'll find the rules and click on the red exclamation mark at the bottom right. This activates the inspection mode. It works by marking the thing that doesn't fit or is missing and the rule or detail matching it (that is, in our case the table and rule that says that missing document is mandatory). If the lines between them trigger "discrepancy detected," you can interact with the immigrant. Then he provides or not the missing document.

This procedure can be applied to everything. Are you not sure about the genre? Click on the M/F in the ID and then on the face of the immigrant. This, in most cases, activates the search. The immigrant is scanned from the front and back, so can you identify his gender. But it's not worth checking the dick. There is no big black cock to see. Breasts are a more reliable feature.

The search is activated even when the weight of a person doesn't fit with that mentioned on ID. You can detect a terrorist or a smuggler (black objects can be seen in the photo) thanks to it.

If you are not sure of the identity, E.g., names on the papers are not matching, you need to check his fingerprints.

However, the same applies to all discrepancies. Are you not certain about anything? Turn on the inspection and make sure it is really wrong before you deny his visa. If you are mistaken, you will be penalized (two protocol violations are ok, but every other will cost you $5).

If you are sure, you can deny the immigrant's visa. Just eject the stamps panel and attach the stamp on the appropriate place on the passport. At a later stage of the game, there will be a need to add a reason for rejection. Accepting is much easier.

But sometimes you have to decide whether you will be a good or bad immigration officer. Different dilemmas are waiting for you during the game. Will you help the wife of one of the already accepted men to enter the country despite not having all the papers? Will you deny entry to an agent who pursues one of the women, even though there is nothing wrong with his papers? And what about the mysterious Ezic organization? Will you help them overthrow the current government?

It's up to you. But if you fulfill some of these mini-quests, you get a badge, achievement and some will earn you some more coins to your payout.

From the beginning, I checked about six people a day, because everything is controlled by clicking. Fortunately, you'll be able to unlock improvements later, so you can manage some tasks with a keyboard or double-click (I still don't know how double-click works). Thanks to them you'll be more productive and able to get up to twice as many people as you could until then. However, with increasing rules, it is getting harder and slower, and sometimes the day ends earlier due to a terrorist attack.

You can't do anything against it at first, but later you will have a tranquilizer rifle that will help you to defeat the assailant before committing any damage and receive a reward.

You will receive the reward even for the number of people detained after you have talked to one of the patrolmen. Thanks to all these little incomes, your family will live quite well.

Book of rules

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This book has been mentioned several times, and you won't be able to play without it. You can find here:

• List of rules valid for the current day
  The basis is that the papers must be valid, but over time, there will be a lot more rules. E.g., work permit, entry permit, passport confiscation, mandatory search, etc. These are things you have to check for each person.

• Map and individual passports information
  Here is essential to check whether Issuing City agrees, and in the case of Arstotzka, the district on ID also must be controlled. There are seven countries with seven passport types.

• Booth info
  Here you will find information about the improvements made to your table (key binds to speed up some features etc.) and a brief description of the information you have at your disposal.

• Documents
  Description of the individual documents that you encounter to recognize their validity.

• Confiscation
  Later there will be confiscation section, where you will find out whose passports to confiscate.

It is quite possible that there will be more. I still play the game.

End of the day

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At the end of the working day, whether after an emergency at the border or after a standard working time, you will see:

• Class
  It means what social class you are in. The eighth will be the worst I think.

• Text
  It will tell you that something interesting happened that day or let you know of a new workplace improvement.

• Circles
  There are badges that you have received for the accomplished moral tasks. There are seven, which is the number of states. So every badge is country specific.

• Passports
  They indicate whether the family has passports or not.

• Improvements
  Below the passports, you can see purchased workspace improvements (Space for toggle inspect, Tab for stamps, bookmarks in a rule book and double-click for inspect).

• Table with your earnings and expenses
  Some expenses are inevitable because you have to live in some reasonable way, but you may need to improve your workplace, moving to a better apartment, etc. Decision making is considerably worse when someone in the family is ill, and you don't have enough money.

• Status of family members
  Your goal is that everyone is OK.

Endings

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The game has 20 different endings, and it's up to you to catch 'em all. All your actions will have some consequences, so you will have to think well. For example, don't accept inappropriate donations, because you never know who will report you, even if you don't buy anything unusual for it.

Fortunately, the game is far from ending because the game is saved at the end of each day, so you can change the decision you have made one of the previous days. Thanks to this, your saves begin to branch and will create a pretty nice graph.

I already discovered four endings, and they are marked by the small dots above the line (it took me a while to figure out what they mean).

Summary

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At first glance, Papers, Please, seems like a weird and boring game. But the appearance is deceiving. The beginning is going to be awkward until you find and get used to its gameplay, but if you don't give up, the game will offer up to dozens of hours of fun to find new endings and continue the story. ...and maybe you'll learn something about this regime.

I would reproach its stereotype (well, work is about stereotype) and soundtrack because you can't play the game for several hours without breaks. After a couple of hours, it'll get on your nerves, but despite that, I already spent six hours with it and I will definitely return to it.

My expectations were low, and the game really surprised me. So I'll recommend it to you! This game is definitely worth trying.

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May the seed be with you! :D