The paperwork itself gets progressively more complicated. On the first day (each "day" is a new "level"), it's pretty straight forward. You look at their passports, cross-reference with your guide book to make sure all the information is accurate, and you let them in. If, for example, the passport is expired, or has an illegitimate city of issue, you must deny entry.
As the game progresses, the requirements increase. Each day begins with a newspaper, wherein you learn about the political climate of this fictional world. Arstotzka endures terrorist attacks, polio outbreaks, and economic sanctions - all of which impact its immigration policy. This results in a constantly shifting standard you must use when processing people coming into the country. Starting easily enough, it eventually gets to the point where you have to be checking passports, entrance papers, vaccination documentations, ID cards, and keeping your eye on a Most Wanted Criminals list too. If a person's appearance is different than it appears on their passport or ID card, you will have to check finger prints, or - at times - issue full body scans. Basically, there's a lot to do.
All of this is made worse by the fact that you get paid by the properly processed applicant. If you process ten people, for example, you would earn $50 for the day. However, that supposes you processed everyone correctly. If, say, you processed seven of those properly, then you would only earn $35. Most often, I found my mistakes to occur as a result of trying to speedily process people, figuring I did a good enough once-over of their paperwork, and trying to make as much money as possible. Predictably, this resulted in a number of mistakes.
See, the other part of the gameplay is that at the end of the day, you must allocate your money. You are a government employee, but you aren't paid particularly well. They move you into a nearby apartment, but it's still up to you to pay for rent and food and medicine. It all takes place in December, so heat is also a concern. You're not only charged with protecting the country's border; you also must take care of your family. Often, you are put in a position where you must choose between paying for food or paying for heat. Family members getting sick is inevitable as well, and you won't want to put off buying medicine for too long. They will die pretty quickly if you don't! If processing people quickly and correctly wasn't stressful enough, you then have to make decisions about whether to go hungry for a day or two, or go cold and sick for a day or two.
Characters you process will give you opportunities to make more money. Some fellow guards will offer you payment for detaining applicants, since they also get paid per person they hold. Other entrants will try to bribe you as well. The tricky thing about it all is that every time you incorrectly process someone, you get a citation from the government. At one point, one of the other guards offers to pay you a good amount for letting in the woman he loves, who is coming from another country without proper paperwork. If you do that, you make more money, but you will be issued a citation. After accruing enough citations, you will be imprisoned, so you really need to be careful.
It's that complicated sense of morality that makes the game so truly compelling. It's really hard to feel like a good person as you're denying a woman fleeing an oppressive government, desperate for refuge, because she doesn't have the proper paperwork. You could let her in and save her life, but that means you take a citation, and you have your own family to think about. There are many situations like that throughout the game where you want nothing more than to help those people, but maybe you already have a couple citations and you just can't afford to take that chance yourself.
In fact, I would argue that Papers, Please does more for morality in gaming than any of those other classic games that utilize a morality system, like Mass Effect. There is no clear cut sense of being a "good guy" or a "bad guy." You are just a person trying to make it through this too. In order to ensure your own survival and freedom, as well as your family's, you must make moral sacrifices. This isn't a perfect world. In that sense, the choices you are forced to confront are more organic, and more complex.
Papers, Please features twenty possible endings, depending on how far you get, and what choices you make. For example, if you make enough mistakes early on, you will be arrested. If you get to your audit (which is about thirty days in) and it is revealed that you let in some known terrorists - even if they had all their paperwork in order - you will be arrested and hanged for treason. Similarly, how your family fairs depends on how you spend your money. My third time through, I managed to keep everyone alive, but I myself was executed.
At times, it feels a bit like the game is specifically rigged. It didn't dawn on me until late in the game that I should have denied those members of the mysterious EZIC group, looking to take down the (almost certainly) fascist dictatorship of Arstotzka. But a couple of them had the proper paperwork, and I didn't think I could take the citation. Of course, then I felt strange about that! Am I that weak of a person that my own government can scare me into doing things I am morally against, or fighting for what I actually believe in? There are also a few moments where scripted events force you to take a citation, regardless. That can be frustrating, but all serves the greater purpose of the game.
There have been some who criticized the gameplay for being too tedious, but that sort of misses the point. Being tedious is the point, and is what creates some of the tenseness of the game. As I mentioned earlier, most of my mistakes came from trying to process people quickly, which is hard to do when you've got five or six different things you need to check. That doesn't happen if the gameplay is super streamlined and efficient. As strange as it is to say, feeling a bit like a tough job is part of the appeal of the game. It speaks to the difficult nature of immigration policy and the people who work those jobs. By the end of the game, I was just drained from the work itself, as well as the dehumanizing nature of it.
All of that makes Papers, Please one of the most poignant and surprisingly powerful games I've ever played. It's not a hard game to learn, but it's a challenging game to play. I don't like to score things in my write-ups, and I try to avoid saying things like, "You should check this game out!" But, I do think this is a game that even non-gamers should check out.
It feels especially important now...
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