![]() ![]() You get the day's news on the political climate from a newspaper's front page, and from dubiously-trustworthy supervisors - the sort who'll pay you extra if you choose to detain potentally-fraudulent candidates for entry, not simply turn them away. You're an officer of the fictional nation of Artstozka, and all around you visual and tonal elements suggest a bleak, aging Soviet bloc. Beyond that, though, the game's real brilliance comes from the dystopic bleakness of its setting. ![]() "From a design perspective, that structure made it easy for me to fill out a complex set of gameplay-oriented rules and regulations." A cog in the machine Papers, Please has a pleasantly-tactile feel, from each day's opening with a coarse, clacking shutter to the definitive punch of a bright, haphazard stamp aligned over each passport. "The bureaucratic structure is something that fits naturally," Pope tells Gamasutra. Names, faces, issue and expiration dates all need to check out, and as the game adds in special regulations for unusual circumstances, it gets properly maddening. Papers, Please, the game that emerged from that simple, even counter-intuitive concept, is brilliant on a mechanical level - in order to earn enough to support their struggling family, the player needs to process as many travelers as they can in one day, an objective balanced against the stated goal of only admitting those who have their increasingly-complicated documents in order. In what's to most a dull necessity, the game designer saw a fascinating opportunity: Instead of playing as common fiction's heroic spy, smuggler or subversive, what if you played as the bureaucratic inspector? Lucas Pope took a number of uneventful trips through international border control stations, fascinated by the stamping and paper-shuffling. ![]()
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January 2023
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