| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PC | 7.80 |
| Overall | 7.80 |
|
Ever want to be a customs official who checks passports? Of course you do, everyone dreams of that as a child. Well here is your chance to live out the glorious life of the document checking professional in this indie game made by one man called Papers. Please. All done with state of the art 8-bit graphics, Papers Please will test your resolve, patience and how perceptive you are as you check documents over and over and over again. Yes that is all you do! Check documents! Yay! Alright enough kidding around, so it’s not the most glamorous game around but it will compel you in ways you never thought document checking could. The reason why this game works so well is because it takes a mundane task and injects it with very traditional video game qualities. Papers, Please is broken down into days, each day lasts about 8-10 minutes, and at the end of each day you are rewarded with money depending on how many citizens you were able to process that day. If you incorrectly deny a passport that should be cleared you are penalized. The game becomes a race against the clock to view as many passports in a limited amount of time without screwing up, somehow this works amazingly well. The reason it works so well is how there are new rules and policy changes almost every day. The first day will be simple, check one or two documents for an expiration date, make sure the photo and info matches and that is about it. By the 25th day you need to check 5 documents at a time, make sure they are not from your country as you must confiscate their passport if they are, check for wanted criminals, scan for weapons or contraband and more. The ever changing rules keep the player on their toes, the need to develop new strategies in how to organize your limited desk space and finding the best order to check documents becomes a must. There is a lot of buzz on this game which I believe comes from of how the story presents itself. Every day the player will be confronted by someone asking you to allow them through the border even though they have violated one policy or another. They will share a sad story or they will attempt to bribe you. A secret organization will try to recruit you so they may try to over throw the oppressive government from within. Newspaper headlines each day show the effects of your actions and in the most minimalistic way possible creates this grand story about being a near insignificant worker in a totalitarian government and whether you chose to rebel or follow orders at the expense of personal safety of yourself and your family. It all sounds very exciting but the reality is that this game does a poor job of developing that story and how your actions have impact on the world. At the end of each day you have a status screen that shows the money you earned and how much you must spend to feed and provide shelter to your family which is represented by a circle that says “Wife” or “son”. If they die the circle says “dead”. That is it; that is the extent that the game goes to drive home the concept that you killed a family member. I do not care that a circle says dead, I felt nothing when my “son” died because there was no son, in fact it made making more money easier. There is almost no connection to your “family” and your actions as it is simply a menu with words that the game hopes means something to you. There is no reward that makes saving your family feel important and there is no punishment outside of a game over if you lose all of them if you lose a few family members. Also the newspaper reports are so basic, for instance you may decline someone from entering who begged you that he would die if you did not let him through. Your penalty for letting him through will affect your money intake, the effect of not letting him through is a simple headline in a newspaper…I don’t care about the newspaper. The story aspect had tons of potential. The main story line of the cult trying to over throw the government works well because it takes place over multiple days and has many moving parts that change the game at moments. Almost all other storylines fall flat because the presentation of those actions is so limited that it becomes almost pointless to have them even represented in the game. Stuff like Jorgi, your commander inspecting you, and a few other storylines worked well, which is where the focus should have been. Way too many days go by where nothing significant happens. I found Papers, Please to be extremely compelling but was a bit let down as I felt it could have been more. I found the actual gameplay to be very fun; it reminded me of some really weird NES game that would become a cult following if it had been released years ago. There is an endless mode that can be unlocked which allows you to perform time trails or endurance runs against leaderboards which can be quite addicting. I understand this was done on a crazy budget and was developed by one man, in that regard it is a great achievement. With a little more polish and a little more focus on elements outside the document checking this can become one of the strangest best franchises around. |
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Posted by Dvader Sat, 18 Jan 2014 06:32:43
Recently Spotted:
*crickets*
Hey Edge, its as good as Witcher 2!
And it's better than Witcher 2