Glory to Arstotzka! Next. Papers, Please.

So I just discovered a fun little title on Steam called Papers, Please. In it you are an inspections officer at the border of an oppressive socialist state. Your job is to check the papers of those trying to enter the glorious country of Arstotzka by passing from West Grestin to East Gresting (SUBTLETY!). This may sound boring, but the real fun comes from the scripted events when criminals, spies, assassins, and celebrities with improper documentation try to sneak past. We've all seen this moment in movies: as recently as Argo we have a scene where the heroes have almost escaped Iran, but their fate rests in the hands of some bureaucrat with a rubber stamp. Papers, Please does an interesting thing by giving you that stamp.

But you don't just have the stamp: at the end of the day you must go back to your tiny apartment and decide if you will spend your meager savings on food or heating (you have no choice about paying rent). You feel genuinely stressed out when a family member gets sick and you must decide whether to starve or freeze to purchase medicine. The beauty of the game is that you get paid based on the number of people you process, not on how many get in or get turned away, and you get fined for making mistakes. So maybe to eat tonight, you have to let the husband in and turn away his wife, who has lost her entry form. Maybe to afford heat, you have to arrest someone you would otherwise simply turn away because the guards are bribing you. Maybe to buy medicine, you have to turn away freedom fighters. Freedom fighters you start to hate, actually, when their terrorist attacks force your checkpoint to close early, meaning you lose the five or ten dollars you could have squeezed out in the last hour of the day.

And this is why I love Papers, Please: it's one of the first games with moral choices that actually are moral. The game doesn't pull the bullcrap so many moral choice systems do, where if you make the right choice you still get the reward (or an even bigger reward). If you save the old man, somehow he has just as much money as the mob boss who hired you to rough him up; if you spare the villain's life, he thanks you and gives you a powerful item. Not in Papers, Please. If you make the right choice, sometimes the only reward you get is the good feeling. Deciding to keep the married couple together got me a citation and nothing more. Letting freedom fighters through on my first playthrough got me noticed by the Ministry of Information and eventually led to my arrest. If you want to do the right thing, you do it only because it is the right thing, and you do it at your own risk.

The game is beautifully atmospheric, and it puts you in a different mindset. I love that I was able to help the revolution with one button press while detaining innocent people for bribe money with the next. It's a fun thought experiment tied to a surprisingly engaging puzzle game, and I would recommend highly recommend it. As long as you're willing to have the Arstotzka National Anthem stuck in your head all day.