Papers, Please

You know those moments in a game, movie, or a show where the main characters give their passports to a cold-hearted border control worker behind a desk who cruelly denies their permission to pass through for some obscure reason? That's basically the guy you play as in 'Papers, Please', a new independant game still in it's premature, beta phase. The art design is really nothing more than simple 10-bit graphics, designed to make the game look retro, old-yet-cool. Which is something I don't really understand. There was nothing special about visuals in games during the 1980's and early 90's, they were just old. And new games with old graphics can only really appeal to nostalgic-eyed people who grew up with it. I suppose to remind them of the simple days before their very late first stages of puberty. But besides that, the story is surprisingly solid enough to keep hold of my shamefully short attention span and the game-play is a nice turn away from the the seemingly endless row of point, shoot and kill games I've been playing recently. The objective of the game is to inspect the papers the people in line hand you and you have to decide whether or not they are illegible to pass right through. But you can't just let everyone through or else there will be penalties. You need to do a good job to get a decent pay check in order to pay for the rent, food, heat and medicine required to keep your family of four healthy; it's sort of like the Oregon trail if it were directed as a Russian comedy. But the thing about your family is that you never see them, a lot like my relationship with my family, no, seriously, the only reason you know that they exist is because by the end of each level you're given a list of your family members and a status determining whether they are healthy, hungry, sick or cold. They don't even communicate with you, they're not worried about the safety of your job or concerned about how the ministry treats foreigners. For all we know, they could just be robots that fuel on bread and cough syrup. There isn't a lot of feelings for them. The inspections are easy enough at first, only needing to check for gender, issuing city, expiration date and picture, but in further levels you have to deal with foreigner papers, verification codes, names, stamps, tickets, worker forms, i.d.'s finger-prints, strip-searches, and listen for verbal information. There were too many times when I had to check every print on every piece of paper that was thrown into a scattered mess on my desk, searching for any typo or any sign of forgery, and when I was fully convinced that the traveler was acceptable for passage the game snapped at me because the gender on the passport was incorrect. A lot of people might not be interested in a game that requires you to do paperwork. Which makes sense, people don't relax after work by going home and doing more work, so let's focus on the story. Almost every character that comes up to your desk might give a back-story about their lives and a little bit of information about the issues between different countries. Sometimes a person will come up to your desk with a passport, the passport had a typo and the character will give a sob story about how they will be killed if they go back to their country or that they will never see their children. In this situation you can either be loyal to your job and deny the person or you can show a kindness of heart and accept them. I decided to let them pass and as a sign of gratitude they rewarded me for my charity before the game yelled at me. But these are smaller stories next to the big one. One time I was inspecting a man's passport and before I could tell them that his picture looked different, I was interrupted by the screams of sirens and the panic of people. I looked up to notice that someone climbed over the wall and threw a bomb at a security guard before he was shot to death. The ministry discovered which country the man was from and I was issued to strip-search anyone from that country. I strip-searched one man and I noticed that he had something strapped to his leg. I was about to call for security when he claimed that he was only a doctor carrying medicine and tried to bribe me for passage, but I decided to call for security anyways. By the end of the day I discovered that the son became sick and that I didn't have enough money to pay for medicine. Then it hit me: If I just let that man bribe me then I could have paid for the medicine, the game would have only given me a warning, but then again he could actually have been a terrorist threatening my own country. That's an interesting question: would you sacrifice the safety of your country in or order to protect your family or vice-versa? 'Papers, Please' is one of those games that makes you think or bring up topics in conversations and that might be worth getting. You can get it for free from the website. It's still in its beta so the ending will creep up on you very quickly, but I'm interested to see where the story is going from here.