Welcome to glorious Arstotzka! The year is 1982 and you have been picked from the labour lottery as Arstotzka's newest border guard. It's not the best job in the world but you have to do it so you can provide for your family and, oddly, your mother in law. And also if you don't, you'll probably end up in prison and your family will be killed or dead within the week, so there's that little caveat as well. So under strict orders and an even stricter time limit, you must prepare to check papers like you've never checked them before. Mistakes will be made, bribes will be offered and people may be knocked out right in your booth, but that is the dangers you face as border control. So buckle up, prepare the denied stamps and be prepared for the sounds of citations, at least for the first 20 minutes or so.
There isn't much to the gameplay in Papers, Please. You're literally checking documents to see if the information matches up with what the person has said. You start off fairly easily, where you're just checking for a certain nationality and letting them. However, you're soon checking to see if someone's work permit matches up with what they've told you, if they're smuggling contraband or they could possible be forging the seals on their documents. Thankfully, Papers, Please takes it time to introduce you to these new mechanics as you go along, making sure you're never over-whelmed too much. You will feel a little out of your depth at times as the sheer amount of new stuff you learn as you progress through Papers, Please will take a fair bit of getting used too; however Papers, Please does its best to explain to you exactly what you should be looking for and how to identify it. They even have a handy little rulebook you can check as you play, just to make sure you're making the right call in accepting or denying somebodies entry to Arstotzka.
Papers, Please works pretty well, considering its simplicity. You have only a handful of things to interact with, so it's mostly a quick and painless job to navigate with very few hiccups along the way. The sheer amount of new things and information thrown at you every time you start a new day can be frightening, but once you've got your head around it and a firm grasp of how everything works, you'll soon be stamping papers like its the job you were born to do. Papers, Please also gets another tick in its favour by adding moral dilemmas into the game. These aren't as obvious as you think, nor are they like the choices you find in Mass Effect, for example. You get caught between the problem of doing your job properly and doing the morally correct thing and, at times, it's hard to pick which one you should do. Do you follow your job description and ban a wife who forgot her papers from joining her husband, or do you let her in and risk losing 5 credits that could be used to feed your family, which is why you are doing this job in the first place? And even though the majority of the people you see will be faceless names, every decision you make will impact your families living conditions, for better or worse.
There are a couple of issues however, the chief one being that pointing out discrepancies can be very fiddly at times. Papers, Please has a system in place that allows you to select a certain part of a document, be it a passport number or an expired date, and click it so that you can interrogate the person and inform them it's out of date or that it doesn't match. However, sometimes when you go to click a specific part of a document, you can sometimes accidentally click the entire thing and that means you can't highlight a specific rule to bring to the owners attention. This happens rarely but when it does happen, it cuts into the time you have in the day to check papers. Another issue could be the repetitiveness of a game like Papers, Please. Seeing as it's a game that's literally about stamping papers, there isn't much gameplay variety, at least in the early stages. A few more gameplay elements are added as you progress but it may be too little, too late for some people to carry on playing as they may get burned out on simply stamping papers, even with the various different rules that are imposed as you progress.
Papers, Please is a fun little game and one that I was surprised I got into. You literally don't do anything apart from stamp papers and sometimes watch people get hurt by border guards. However, with the small random events that drive a basic but serviceable plot, an interesting moral choice system, charming graphics and an even more charming character who keeps coming back over and over again to try and get into your country, Papers, Please is a game that is worth your time and money. It's a unique game and I'd recommend it to anyone who have a desire to try something new and different.