The right answer may seem obvious, but every penalty that costs money means less food, heat, and medicine for the family back home – a family that has to stay alive, if only because the Ministry of Admission has no time for a slacker who can’t provide for one. There are moral decisions, like whether to separate a husband and wife whose paperwork doesn’t match, or play white knight and turn a pimp away before he can get his hands on a girl who claims he tricked her over the border. A wrong name, spotted! The wrong stamp, denied! A bomb, discovered! Reaching for the approval stamp can even start to feel like an admission of defeat, at least until a citation for failure actively doesn’t pop up to be a mark of shame.Īvoiding spoilers, the story mode also offers more than just random paperwork over its month-long run. Instead, it’s part of why spotting mistakes feels more than simply playing Spot The Difference or running through a checklist – the slow mental accretion of things like town names and standard traps becoming a learned skill that allows for ever more efficiency. The limited space for paperwork, for instance, soon ends up being a major liability, with documents piled on top of documents and key information not always on hand. It’s your little scrap of power, for crushing the fools who would dare insult Arstotzka’s finest, or gracing an occasional sob story with administrative pity.Time and again, the details make the experience so much more than it might have been.

The limited space and even more limited colour palette make the job feel oppressive but not actively unpleasant, with the ka-chunk finality of the DENIED or APPROVED stamp providing a shortcut straight into the brain of a terminal jobsworth. There’s a real tactility to handling the documents handed over by each person who arrives at the booth in the hope of work, a new life, or simply going home of shuffling them around what passes for your desk to double-check names and details and make sure the name on someone’s work visa matches the one on their passport. There’s more to Papers Please than just spotting a mismatched date or a missing access pass, though it’s impressive how satisfying even those simple slices of detective work can be.

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