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Lucas Pope marks 10 years of Papers, Please with a free demake for your browserApprove/deny?
Approve/deny?
Image credit:Lucas Pope
Image credit:Lucas Pope
The demake gives you the simplified strokes of the celebrated 2013 game: you’re a border control officer, approving or denying entry to the fictional country of Arstotzka, which boils down to checking mugshots and bios against faces that, in this rendition, call to mind Rorschach blots. The representation of an LCD screen with “baked-in” graphics is impressive - I had to fight the urge to tilt my computer to catch the sunlight while playing.
Much has been written about Papers, Please and the line it treads between efficiency and empathy, together with the fine detail of its satire of the immigration process and Soviet bureaucracy. John Walker (RPS in peace) summarised it as follows in hisoriginal review. “Its lofi graphics and static setting join its focus on mundanity and repetition under pressure to suggest something that sounds about as far away from ‘game’ as you might imagine.” But he added that it’s “an engrossing, creeping affair, almost rogue-like in its grip on you to last longer, work faster, abandon principles more freely”.
Graham called the way it balances obeying your government’s directives and processing candidates quickly with showing kindness to the people you screen “an ethically interesting quandary”, but noted that “you’ll get the point pretty quickly”.Playing the game in 2015, he found that “what makes me return to Papers, Please - and what makes me glad there’s an endless mode - is the simple pleasure of handling documents, scanning rules, and pressing chunky interface buttons when I’ve made my mind up.”
I think that recasting Papers, Please as an LCD game brings those “simple pleasures” to the fore, inasmuch as I used to play on LCD handhelds as a child, and the demake strips out a lot of the sobering narrative context. The stately way each piece of documentation beeps into view makes me giggle. But the LCD faceblot effect also lends the game an eerie new dimension which makes me thankful that it doesn’t (as far as I can tell) include the original’s option to strip-search migrants. And perhaps the experience is all the grimmer for being presented in such a twee, condensed fashion: I’m trying to imagine how I would feel about it if the demake had been released first.
