Let’s cut to the chase: you don’t need me to tell you that Papers, Please is great, nor does the game need my validation. There’s a reason this immigration officer role-player is widely considered one of the most influential and flat-out best indie games ever made. Yet, with over a decade of existence behind it, it’s worth re-examining exactly what makes it a bonafide masterpiece.
A bit of background is necessary to understand the place that Papers, Please holds in gaming history. It all started with its one-man-band developer Lucas Pope, who left his comfortable job at Naughty Dog after Uncharted 2 to work on personal projects. Here he began to make a name for himself in the independent gaming scene with free projects typically created for game jams.
Chief among these was The Republia Times, a precursor to Papers, Please in which you’re tasked with laying out the front page of an authoritarian country’s propaganda rag in order to garner public support for its government. To force your hand, the government holds your family hostage, their survival hinging on your willingness to conform. As you progress through each day, a resistance force begins inserting secret missives amidst selectable news blurbs asking you to tank the paper’s reputation and help topple Republia’s government, only for their new democratic government to perpetuate the same cycle as its forebear. This provocative statement on the role of the media apparatus as a political mouthpiece caught the imagination of many, leading to fascinated coverage and award nominations.
Pope clearly had the framework of something special with The Republia Times, and he’d realize its potential with Papers, Please just over a year later. This to-be landmark release maintained the concept of placing players in an unappealing vocation under the thumb of an oppressive government, with your family’s survival dependent on your performance. However, its massively expanded scope draws a web of moral quandaries that leave you to ponder the role of bureaucracy under authoritarian rule, the dehumanization endemic to border control, and how easily a personal code of ethics slips away when ignoring it is the only way to keep your family alive.
To expound: you take on the role of an immigration officer inspecting the passports and myriad documents of prospective entrants to the fictional 1980s-era Soviet Bloc country of Arstotzka (to which Republia is a neighbor). The inspection process is overwhelming given the number of items you must cross-check, daily bureaucratic ordinances that change the rules, and an unwieldily large handbook to sift through. Your desk space is too small to display all this material at once, meaning you’re left scrambling through a clutter of papers as you seek out discrepancies. Mastering Papers, Please’s gameplay is intentionally all but impossible because this chaos inevitably leads to errors. It effectively conveys the stressful nature of the job, though it’s never frustrating due to responsive mouse controls, and Pope’s clean art direction makes it easy to identify documents based on their shape, size, and color.
Of course, there’d be little challenge in examining documents if not for a ticking clock that demands expediency alongside accuracy. Each workday lasts a handful of minutes, and your salary is based on how many entrants you can correctly process in that time. Mistakes can cost you dearly, as those beyond the first two result in a stacking pay cut. At the end of each day, you allocate your earnings toward food, heat, and medicine for your family. Failure to do so can quickly spiral into the untimely death of your kin, a responsibility that factors into every choice you make while at the border.
When trying to perform your duties on the straight-and-narrow comes up short (and it likely will), you’re left to resort to unsavory income sources. I won’t go into everything this entails for the sake of spoilers, but at their simplest, they come in the form of bribes for turning the other cheek to improper documentation or contraband smuggling. You incur citations for these acts, which in turn increases the pressure to perform perfectly; these risk-reward moments permeate every corner of Papers, Please.
Further, bribes are vehicles for the game to explore morality. For example, a man seeking revenge may bribe you to let him in, only for the next day’s paper to run headlines about the murder they went on to commit. Perhaps the person murdered was themselves a murderer, but does your playing judge and jury actually qualify as justice? In other cases, it may be as simple as whether or not you let an entrant’s spouse through despite their lack of documents. Scenarios like these populate Papers, Please without providing clear-cut answers to the virtue of your actions.
These scripted entrants are also how Papers, Please doles out its broader plot that impacts the ending you receive. I’m hesitant to say too much about this because the unexpected ways it can play out are critical to the game’s impact. What’s worth noting is how every story branch plays out entirely through core game mechanics during your daily shifts, resulting in a convincing illusion that the world is emergently reacting to your choices. It’s a smoke-and-mirrors trick that works even when you know what’s coming. Different playthroughs may require different adaptations depending on how well you perform your duties.
There are also a handful of nice touches worth noting. The downtime at the start of each day where you can organize your desk, decorate your booth, and on certain days speak to colleagues and supervisors makes the world feel authentic. Events that take place outside your booth as displayed along the top of the screen make the world feel alive. There are also optional items to spend extra cash on that often add little to the gameplay but help characterize your family beyond a list of relations.
If all this sounds like more work than fun, you’re not entirely wrong. Papers, Please isn’t where you go for a traditionally good time. In fact, it’s a constant pure pressure cooker that keeps you on the edge of your seat. But it’s exactly this visceral reaction that makes it utterly engaging. The interplay between every system results in a complete symbiosis of gameplay and narrative; every choice and even moments of inaction have rippling effects across the rest of the game. Plus, the tactile nature of clicking and dragging items around your booth is endlessly satisfying, and there’s an undeniable dopamine rush every time you correctly approve or deny an entrant. This is only more potent once you’ve played enough to have memorized much of the handbook, creating a sense of learning on the job.
Papers, Please does offer an easy mode that awards a fairly substantial bonus to every day’s salary. On one hand, I applaud this addition for making the game more accessible, though I also strongly recommend not enabling this unless you absolutely must. The game’s narrative stakes and overall meaning are derived from its intentionally stressful gameplay. This is not a game you blast through to reach the end; in fact, the endings serve only to enhance the moral ambiguity of the journey you took to reach them. The game also lets you replay any day at any time so there’s no worry about ruining a playthrough if things going awry. This is also a smart compromise for those looking to find all 20 of the game’s endings, though most of them are pretty similar outside of those on the final day that conclude the storyline your actions dictated.
Also on the accessibility docket is a toggle to disable nudity when scanning entrants, covering their private parts with underwear. This broadens the demographics that can play the game, though it’s probably not a game suited for younger folk, regardless. It also makes the game playable in public spaces and on streams. However—and it’s as strange to type this as read it—I highly encourage trying the game with nudity on. It’s a key method through which Papers, Please dehumanizes entrants, alongside their incomprehensibly garbled voices, procedurally generated faces, and documentation that boils their existence down to generic characteristics and numbers. Scanning them thus feels particularly gross, as with the click of a button you shred them of what remains of their dignity.
The cold, heartless dystopia that is Arstrotzka is tangible in every aspect of Papers, Please’s visual presentation. The concrete walls and sheet metal are oppressively utilitarian, and the muted color palette—aside from that vibrant Arstrotzkan red—somehow only dampens the vibe further. Procedural generation for non-story characters also helps ensure that the game remains fresh on repeat playthroughs. Pope’s artistic prowess arguably improved in fidelity with Return of the Obra Dinn, but for me, he’s yet to top Papers, Please in tone, function, and iconography.
If there’s one aspect of Papers, Please that has aged less gracefully, it’s the soundtrack. The main theme remains a great tone-setter as it alternates notes in tandem with the title card’s iconic march-like scroll. However, it’s undermined by cheap-sounding audio quality and a broken loop. The few other tracks—which I find compositionally weaker to begin with—fare even worse as they try to emulate a greater number of instruments at once and sound like a compressed, single-track mess because of it. Those songs only play during endings, so it’s only a minor issue. On the other hand, the harsh sound effects and voice warbling implemented by Pope are the cherry on top of making the world feel destitute. These are what you hear for the majority of your playtime, so it was critical to nail this.
Lastly, it’s worth touching on Papers, Please’s robust endless mode, something I admittedly forgot existed before returning to the game for this review. While this game is largely lauded for its story, this is a great addition for anyone who wants more of the cross-examination gameplay without any weighty narrative beats. The three variants (timed, perfection, and endurance) can be paired with rule sets emulating the document requirements of four different points in the story. There are some nags, though, like how the scoreboard opens a web browser and only one specific ending provides the code to unlock the mode. It matters little, as the code is easy to find online, but it’s still baffling as anyone who completes all 31 days of the story will have developed the skillset and game knowledge needed to play endless. (Not to mention that the particular ending required to receive the code is one most players won’t receive on their initial playthrough.)
Since the 2013 release of Papers, Please, Lucas Pope has continued to release related media. Most noteworthy are the fantastic short film he co-wrote that explores a day in the life of the immigration officer and a browser-playable LCD handheld demake he co-developed with his wife for the game’s 10th anniversary. He also created a spiritual successor in Mars After Midnight earlier this year, though I personally wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it. And of course, we must mention Return of the Obra Dinn, another game that garnered Pope awards and critical acclaim, including from us not once but twice.
I truly believe that Papers, Please is a game that everyone should experience, but saying any more than I have would tarnish the surprises in store for first-time players. Alternatively, if you’ve played the game before, I highly recommend a return trip. It’s a timeless classic.
