As the article is more about the developer and his story rather than the game itself, the premise of the game isn't quite captured in the article.
Specifically, the tension comes from the fact that you are in some fictional former soviet state, which just opened up a border security crossing again. You've been posted to man it, and now live with your family in a government housing estate. You have a finite amount of time to process people through the security gate each 'day' and you're paid based on how many people you get through, with fines for incorrect processing (which of course gets harder and more convoluted as the game goes on).
At the end of each day, your income and expenses (for rent, food, electricity, medicine for your son/wife/elderly parents as needed) are shown. The tension comes from rushing to process enough people to ensure you don't have to go without food, or turn off electricity, or not medicate your family. However, if you make too many mistakes by rushing, you get fined too much and you don't get to care for your family.
It's really far more gripping than you'd expect because the whole art style, audio and interactions (both between days via a daily newspaper, and with the people as they enter through your booth/events that unfold during that) really help paint a picture of a desolate former soviet wasteland of poverty and misery. Couple that with the distilled essence of 'putting food on the table for your family so they don't starve' being the motivating factor, and it can be quite high-tension to try to not have your family inevitably starve and freeze to death with crippling illness.
For $5 (if you grab it during a steam sale), it's worth the experience for sure. I'd have been happy paying the standard $10 for the unique experience it offers.
Pretty much this. The brunt of gameplay is basically a 'spot the differences' game, where said differences are between the people passing through and the rules.
Day one, only people from Arstotzka are allowed in. Easy enough. Picture on passport has to match the person coming up though. Expiration date has to be after the current date, too.
As the game progresses, laws are added, removed, valid papers are added, combined, etc etc etc. Eventually you end up having to check people and their papers for 15-20 points; miss one, you get fined.
Also, there's 20 different endings, depending on your decisions and performance in the game (go broke, help the rebels, etc).
I haven't looked at passport control the same way since then. Also pretty sure passport control I've been to is much less stringent than that in Papers, Please.
This is all very relevant to the gameplay, but I find the most interesting part of the game is the story and how it evolves based on your decisions. You can let anyone through. You can, and are asked to, cut people breaks. You can be a hardass. You can be a tool of the revolution.
It all comes down to the choices you make. At one point, for example, someone with their papers in order comes through and says his wife is next in line. Her papers are not in order. What do you do? Split up the couple to make your money? Or cut them a break and get a demerit.
You can even help drug smugglers and refugees, if you so choose. Or you can earn extra cash by locking up people who simply have an expired certificate.
Few games give you or support this type of narrative freedom.
I think you touch a bit on that, but the game mechanics are interesting:
* you have a limited time every day to review people at the border.
* you are paid per person processed.
* mistakes result in unpaid work. More than 3 mistakes results in penalty on your pay.
* regulations get more and more complicated as you go, making it more difficult to process many people, and making yourself prone to mistakes.
* your family well-being is conditioned by how much you make every day.
* events and personal situations try to touch on your emotional side to incite you to let some people pass (or refuse passage) - making it more difficult to earn your money as well - while giving some hope of later positive effects.
It's really intricate.
The only issue with the game is that it's kind of short, and the main point of the game after a while is to try to go through the story several times to see how your actions can make a difference in the story.
Yeh, I was sort of trying not to give away too many plot devices whilst covering the general concept. Hence no mention of the event on the 2nd or 3rd day, the recurring characters/linked stories, etc. As you point out, it's in some ways a bit of a (very compelling) one trick pony, so experiencing those naturally was a really important aspect of the game's impact to me.
I was thinking that there is one thing that the game could have done better. Your 'Family' part is very much just a statistic on the score screen. While the game tries to create some bonding with random characters on screen, it would have been great if they author had a side story for the family, so that you have an extra emotional incentive to do better and better at your job.
Zero Punctuation did a good review of this game [0] (starts at 3:20) and sums up the attraction to it pretty well in my opinion. "It presents constant moral choices but makes it really hard to be a good person."
It's just a gameplay mechanism. If you want actual realism, then every 'day' in the game should take 12 or so hours to complete, you should have a meal break and regimented toilet breaks, so on and so forth.
I mean, no-one believes that a border crossing is only open for a few minutes only per day, any more than they believe there's an all-powerful control after yours. It's like how the Sims put in toilet requirements for simulation purposes, but it turns out that your character can go without the toilet for a couple of days, then miss half a shift at work because of a visit.
Immigrant communities often live together. Let one known undocumented worker in, and State Security can then follow them to uncover existing communities.
That part actually bothered me, to be frank. For several reasons.
1. It indeed gives the impression that your work is monitored, which should not be the case.
2. It's a mechanism to give you penalties, but it does not really affect the story-line in itself. It would have been great if a person you let pass by mistake actually ends up changing the situation (i.e. becoming a terrorist the next day or something) and therefore introducing more regulations to make your work more difficult.
3. It could have been done in a more subtle way. For example, the guards at the right of the screen could do a random check on top of the ones you do, and find out, not 100% of time but at a certain ratio, you actually make/made mistakes.
Eh, it's somewhat reasonable to expect the failures to get caught quickly. Perhaps there's routine immigrant checks at housing estates, or an employer finds out and reports the illegal immigrations.
I read the original article and was quite intrigued at the premise (a game about document inspecting, how novel), so I shelled out the $10 and bought the game.
Gotta say, after only playing the game for about 20 minutes your review was entirely accurate and I can't wait to make my girlfriend play the game...
What I really love about this game is its meta qualities. Frankly, it's impossible. You simply can't beat it under any normal play. Its utter difficulty actually becomes part of the storytelling experience as you realize you simply will fail no matter what. You truly feel despair when you play.
Moreover, I've found myself becoming rather patient with people who work in the TSA directly because I now know how shitty their lives must truly be.
I didn't find the actual comparison work difficult at all. I always had plenty of money and explored the endings freely. Then again, I used to work in the Census Bureau and spent a lot of time increasing my efficiency at very similar tasks.
Sounds a bit like Jetset - a satirical game by Ian Bogost of Cow Clicker fame. You're a TSA agent who must comply with the ever-changing set of passenger screening rules. From what I gather, it was a game designed explicitly to infuriate the player.
I think there's a bit of that in Jetset, but the tone is lightened by quite a bit of mockery in humorous choices of items and silly rules. It still has some of the angle of trying to keep up with a pointless bureaucracy, but the whole operation takes on a farcical quality, so the critique of the TSA it implies ends up being more like "clown cops doing security theater", not TSA=1984.
You were closer with the word "satire". This kind of game is Ian Bogost's specific shtick; it's worth looking him and his writing up if you haven't already.
If it's all in the setting I hope he releases a sequel set in a developing country where you're trying to rack up as much as many informal "administration fees" as possible without getting caught...
It's corruption distilled to its core. The guard (reasonably) gets extra compensation for doing extra duties (detaining immigrants). The guard wants more money, so gives you a cut to detain more people. You start detaining people who you wouldn't ordinarily have to.
However you can't just detain anyone. The games sets specific conditions to let the detain button appear as a choice. So you can't just go and detain everywhere at will.
However, there are cases where the "detain" button appears even though the person is following the rules (the cases I can think of are where the person's name or appearance has changed, but they pass the fingerprint test)
Still you have moral choice to either turn back a person or detain him/her for something minor such as expired or missing permind. And you do the immoral thing becsuse you need money for medicine fo your kid.
On top of that, you then have some people coming through where you _want_ to fudge the tests, either because they're nasties you don't want to let through, or because you're compassionate and don't want to separate families.
What I find most intriguing about Papers, please is that the game forces you to make moral and ethical choices. During the course of that boring chore you'll have to decide whether to take bribes or help the revolutionaries. Or should you try to save that girl from being human trafficked for prostitution or just do your job to feed the family.
What is even more chilling is that this was day-to-day business in many European countries less than 30 years ago.
It's probably day-to-day business in some European countries today (refuse the Syrian immigrant entering Germany or let him pass). Not to mention other interesting locales like North Korea are probably a similar place.
" You have a finite amount of time to process people through the security gate each 'day' and you're paid based on how many people you get through, with fines for incorrect processing (which of course gets harder and more convoluted as the game goes on)."
When I heard the premise, I was kind of disoriented, and the way you've described it maintains that feeling. If you're border control for a desperately impoverished former soviet state, who are all these people who want to immigrate?
The game explains that the other bordering country is even more impoverished. There are also transit passengers, returning citizens, and temporary workers.
It seems likely that a lot of people bought it, like I did, for a novel experience regardless of whether or not the experience is actually fun.
We're living in quite the renaissance of game exploration. I wonder if the indie game genre will continue to flourish or if this is a temporary moment of history. Regardless it is probably as strong as it has ever been right now.
Since you just linked an indie game on Steam, you probably have to acknowledge that Greenlight is a significant contribution to this renaissance.
Some people might not like to hear this, because Steam is a DRM platform. But if the Pirate Bay had a similar ability to promote the development and sale of indie games, it would have happened already.
I'd argue that Greenlight was a reaction to the renaissance more than a contributing factor. Something like Desura and maybe even Humble Indie Bundle probably register higher, despite the wide reach and range of payment options of Steam.
I'm not sure I would refer to Steam as a DRM platform. Steam application deployment does have apis built in for DRM, but they are not required for release by Valve. It's up to the developer to decide if they want to DRM lock their game using the provided tools.
steam by itself is a DRM. It controls that you are authorized to launch the game, etc.
However, I find this kind of DRM acceptable, since it does get in the way of the legit buyer extremely rarely.
>It controls that you are authorized to launch the game
Steam provides an infrastructure and API to perform this check, but the developers decide whether to use it. There are many games on Steam which don't use this DRM, and can be launched directly from their install directories even if Steam isn't running.
I was about to agree that Steam is DRM, but your comment reminded me of the time I bought a game (Dungeons of Dredmor?) that had a Linux port but which wasn't on Steam. I contacted the developers about getting the Linux port and they said "oh, it's in your Windows Steam game directory, just launch the executable for Linux", and it did, indeed, work fine.
That said, Steam is still not as un-DRMed as GOG, which provides a pretty installer you can copy and back up and do whatever you want with, but it's pretty good.
Only if the developer uses the Steamworks API. If you purchase a game on Steam that does not use any Steamworks, once it's downloaded, you can run it from your computer without Steam running. Many old games you can buy on steam are just the original game with a DosBox launcher that just sits in your SteamApps folder unprotected.
I love this game, though I haven't completed it for all of the endings. I love the idea and the design, that is...first of all, Lucas Pope is the developer I aspire to be...able to singlehandedly dream up a concept and execute it, and be totally personable on Twitter to the mass of fans he deservedly generated.
I fell in love with the game ever since I saw the YouTube trailer and read some of his game dev diaries...It's hard to think of a modern game that has such limitations -- the color palette, the clunkiness of the interface, the unforgivingness of the scoring system -- for such artistic intent.
But what I think is particularly noteworthy and inspiring was how Pope didn't make the game as a political statement. He (from what I remember in his early podcasts) thought about the idea while waiting in customs, and wondered if a game could be made of the drudgery of this work. His commitment to making a game that excelled as a game resulted in a game that was actually fun, while being an artistic achievement and politically engaging, for sympathizers of both the state and the refugee.
(As counter-examples, I think "Cart Life" is also an amazing achievement in art, but not a very good game because of unintentional bugs. Also, most artistic games in which you mostly just walk around until the game ends).
David Simon, who created "The Wire", complains quite bitterly that his intent was to make a show that raged against institution and bureaucracies, and yet people only talked about Omar and all of his other characters...Simon did such a great job of plot and characterization that it overshadowed his political aims. I kind of see "Papers, Please" as the opposite of that...Pope just wanted to make a great game, and he did such a great job of it that it turned out to have a compelling political message.
Anyway, it has my vote for being included in the MoMA's video game collection. And it's inspired me to go back into games programming, at least as a hobby.
1. The art and design are almost unchanged from the original Photoshop mock.
2. Pope is wonderfully gracious to the other indie developers who give initial feedback.
3. He engages really well with the influx of new people that appear whenever his (at the time) beta game gets featured on a gaming news site. He has a knack for knowing which suggestions to consider, and explains to fans why the others won't work with the game. It demonstrates a level of maturity, both in personality and in craft, that few other game developers seem to have.
4. In the post-release update, he details the internal tools he built to manage the game's development, especially its day-to-day plot.
Hey, I want the last three hours of my life back, and that's from just reading the dev journal!
You are correct in his way of dealing with people, really suggests a level of maturity, confidence and open mindedness about him. I like the way that he seems to seriously consider people's ideas, and is not afraid to incorporate me wines into his game. The fingerprinting for example.
Interesting, do you have a link to any of those David Simon comments? I always thought that the themes of "The Wire" were so coherently presented that they would be impossible to overlook.
> But actually, the comments I made that seem to critique viewers who found The Wire late were not so intended. I thought, when I made that remark, that I was speaking to the reporter not about viewers in general, but specifically about folks pursuing the recent bracket-tourneys about best characters, shows, scenes, etc.
It was to that silliness -- and nothing more -- that I tried to say simply this: The folk sponsoring such belated silliness were not there when the show aired. Now, years removed, they parse it piecemeal and to meaningless effect. And rarely in the debate of Omar v. Stringer or Season Two vs. Four does anyone argue, say, the drug war, or the role of public education or the vagaries of market capitalism. That's the wearying part for me.
That people find the show when they do, or that people like or dislike what they will -- who can take offense at that? But is it okay to admit the Omar-is-so-cool bracket tourneys don't interest people who made the show? That debate about what we got right or wrong about urban America would be, to us, more purposeful and validating?
Apparently, no such context conveyed, either through my fault or in the edit of the Q&A, or both. Sorry if anyone thinks I was actually complaining about people liking The Wire, or when they got there. I wasn't. My critique went to how certain media folk assess the story, and how empty that stuff seems to our real purpose.
I agree with David Simon...because every real fan knows that Bunk is the real star ;)
As for not everyone looking at series like the Wire the same way, that's just natural. I'm sure a lot of people think Papers, Please is a shit game too. Can't argue with taste, can't steer people's priorities when it comes to TV shows either. The Wire for example needs a lot of attention and concentration to watch; a lot of people have some TV show on in the background, and only pay attention when something (or someone) draws attention to them.
The indie market is quite open to games that really come out of left field, instead of following the same 5 genres indies always go back to, if just because they are easy and well understood.
Lucas had made a couple of nice mini-games before that showing how relatively unconventional gameplay can be quite fun if attached to a good premise. The Republia Times is pretty much the same emotional concept but with different gameplay.
A big part of the game being a hit IMO was the beta was just out there for download, and it was a very polished first third of the game. A few large blogs picked it up,
and at that point, if the game is any good, it'll just sell a whole lot. The demand was so big that Steam approved it for Greenlight out of schedule: It was greenlit after just a week or two on the process.
Either way, It's a game that is very easy to recommend.
>You know when you play a first-person shooter that claims to be about “how far you’re willing to go to protect the ones you love,” or “the true cost of a life,” or “moral ambiguity,” but the gameplay actually consists of shooting hundreds of dudes in the face? And you know how in the back of your mind, you wonder, “I wonder what it’d be like if a game actually designed its gameplay around those concepts rather than just duct-taping them on through noninteractive story?”
>Papers, Please is that game. It manages to ask (and importantly, not answer) questions of duty, safety, privacy, family, self-interest, and morality through an incredibly simple, focused set of mechanics based around checking transit papers and stamping passports.
Since the article mentions the BAFTA Games Awards a few times: Papers, Please didn't win best game, which was to be expected (though his former employer's The Last Of Us did win that and 4 other awards), however it did win for best strategy/simulation, which was a surprise win (not easy for an indie game to take a bafta). It seemed quite popular at the event, had a few people cheering every time it was mentioned.
I bought it because I thought there's no way this could be fun, but it turned out not only to be fun (in a depressing way), but also to feature a really great emergent story line, which immediately puts it above 80% of other games.
Now we just need a game simulating an analyst in a large SIGINT agency of a fictional superpower. Can you gather enough metadata in a day to feed your family?
I would not be surprised at all if this was already in the making. With that in mind, I'm surprised there hasn't been a ton of clones for Papers, Please yet - like how Minecraft and Terraria clones are all over nowadays.
Also, instead of feeding your family, the object of the game should be to keep your EFF-friendly colleague from going rogue, :p
I think it became a hit as a natural consequence of being so good. He had to do almost no work on promotion, iirc. But I think he was a fairly popular gamedev (or at least not-unknown) before he made Papers, Please.
One thing to realize is that game reviewers like Yahtzee and especially TotalBiscuit always have their eyes open for new games that have new gameplay. That is, games with game mechanics that have never been thought of before. So if anyone here happens to make one, and it's fun, then you'll probably be able to get picked up by TB. And since he has >1M YouTube subscribers, that's quite a lot of publicity.
(Papers, Please was picked up by TB. It's how I heard of it.)
> I think it became a hit as a natural consequence of being so good. He had to do almost no work on promotion, iirc. But I think he was a fairly popular gamedev (or at least not-unknown) before he made Papers, Please.
Looking at it a little cynically for the moment ... in the old days, the main bottleneck that prevented everyone from having their own commercial computer game was money and juice with publishers, while the second-place bottleneck was juice with console manufacturers. Now those factors are much less restricting than before, so everyone has their own indie game. ;) But that means there are many, many more games than the maximum number that can ever achieve significant sales and attention. So the new bottleneck is public attention, and the new king gatekeepers are the gaming media (including Penny Arcade, Let's Players like Totalbiscuit and so on), who can direct the public's attention to your game. So which players are ahead in the new game? Guys with gaming-media juice, either through having gaming-industry recognition or being ex-journalists themselves. Step forward Tom Francis (PC Gamer -> Gunpoint), Jim Rossignol (Rock, Paper, Shotgun -> Sir, You Are Being Hunted) and Lucas Pope (Naughty Dog -> Papers, Please). Now that is a little too cynical, because the new game does seem to be significantly fairer to people who simply make (or would be able to make given funding etc.) a game good enough to deserve attention, and certainly Gunpoint and Papers, Please are notably good games (I haven't played Sir yet). (I should also emphasise that I'm not any kind of expert here, I'm just looking at the situation from the outside.) But I think there's likely some truth to it.
I learned about it first from the Haxe/Openfl mailing lists. They're usually where the language users go to promote some of their games and pet projects like this. However, even on that group there was very little in the way of information on the game. It really did feel like this grew entirely by word of mouth.
Not to deny that Greenlight is important but that seems to be overstating it. There was lots of buzz about Papers, Please back when it was still just a free-download beta on Lucas Pope's website; now it's on not only Steam but also GOG and the Humble Store. Of the notable "indie" hits from the past 3-4 years, most were probably (or certainly) in development before Greenlight was even announced, several got on Steam without going through Greenlight at all, several were successful on other platforms before going onto Steam (Amnesia, SpaceChem (initially rejected for Steam) ...) and some have kissed off Steam completely (famously Minecraft). If anything Greenlight looks a bit like Valve's late entry to the Humble Bundle/XBLA party.
Specifically, the tension comes from the fact that you are in some fictional former soviet state, which just opened up a border security crossing again. You've been posted to man it, and now live with your family in a government housing estate. You have a finite amount of time to process people through the security gate each 'day' and you're paid based on how many people you get through, with fines for incorrect processing (which of course gets harder and more convoluted as the game goes on).
At the end of each day, your income and expenses (for rent, food, electricity, medicine for your son/wife/elderly parents as needed) are shown. The tension comes from rushing to process enough people to ensure you don't have to go without food, or turn off electricity, or not medicate your family. However, if you make too many mistakes by rushing, you get fined too much and you don't get to care for your family.
It's really far more gripping than you'd expect because the whole art style, audio and interactions (both between days via a daily newspaper, and with the people as they enter through your booth/events that unfold during that) really help paint a picture of a desolate former soviet wasteland of poverty and misery. Couple that with the distilled essence of 'putting food on the table for your family so they don't starve' being the motivating factor, and it can be quite high-tension to try to not have your family inevitably starve and freeze to death with crippling illness.
For $5 (if you grab it during a steam sale), it's worth the experience for sure. I'd have been happy paying the standard $10 for the unique experience it offers.