The word bleak means to be without hope or encouragement; depressing; dreary. A bleak future.
Bleak is how one colleague described it to me and I imagine now, it is graffitied across a dilapidated sign that used to have the phrase, ‘Welcome to Arstotzka’ etched into it. The depression generated by Papers, Please has sucked the color from the motherland; the dreariness leaves you to endure the cold winters as you earn your keep as the last line of defense, a gatekeeper to this fictional communist country.
The news is just in and you’ve been voted as the next immigration inspector at a border checkpoint. Your decision is final on who makes it into a country that promise everything; there are queues which zig-zag towards your booth of hope. The make-believe scenarios will test even the hardest person’s emotions and where you would see black and white, good and bad, a dull grey seeps into your blood changing your morality, and the effects will be taken home for not only you to bear the brunt of but also your family to withstand, but you can only suppress so much, can you?
‘Congratulations’, the opening screen says. But before you get carried away with excitement, you’ve not won the lottery. The year is 1982 and 31 days of cross referencing numbers, dates, and symbols separate you from continuing the rest of your life - a life which will be so much easier after all you will have weathered. But in a country with ever changing rules like Arstotzka, life would be much more peaceful and simpler working at the salt mines.
‘Glory to Arstotzka!’ declares the game. Glory indeed.
Forceful music, fitting the dystopian theme, begins with the menu; it saturates an otherwise monochromatic scene as a lone figure walks towards a booth closer to the congested queue. This solitary silhouette is you; as you look to begin your first day of work you’re greeted with your first official bulletin from the ministry of admission. It’s filed into your desk to the left of the screen. Due to the changes each day, you’ll find yourself having to recall it regularly. Seeing other people play the game each one has had a unique setup so that they’re able to quickly look at the regulations of the day and process the mob quicker. Efficiency will soon become key as the processing of each person rewards you with five measly dollars.
Events from the frontline affect the in-game newspaper - ‘The Truth of Arstotzka’ - according to your actions: be they scripted or random. With the beginning of each day, you’re drip-fed new rules and regulations - each require studying before the booth is open. It’s best to keep these close to your side like the 44. Magnum secured a ragged leather holster strapped around the waist of the age-old John Wayne. These regulations act as a sheriff’s badge to those who don’t comply to the motherlands rules.
Processing is open from 6am to 6pm which begins after you have examined the new regulations and called the first victim to your judgement, and during this time, you as the inspector inspect entrants documents, as your suffer a constant barrage of expressions of joy, frustration and camouflaged threats from the first day at an attempt to crack what will eventually break, your discipline.
Particular scripted events occur each day that may cut short things short; these have dire effects which impede your efficiency on multiple levels. One of these is that your source of income for that day is cut short. To keep yourself and your family alive requires you to be able to afford heating, rent and food - earn less money and you’ll find yourself faced with the difficult choice of what to pay for. Food or heat? The rent’s already taken twenty dollars from your income and you can’t afford both. So which will it be?
You have to work at such a frantic pace to assure you can survive the winter; so there can be no slacking, especially as in-game days are perilously short. The best record I was able to achieve was ten of the riffraff processed in a single day. One of these circumstantial events took me by surprise. That harrowing day left me with twenty small dollars - a pitiful amount. I was left with the with the terrible consequence of not being able feeding my son, a situation which left my emotional state afflicted by guilt. I had to witness two deaths as a blaring alarm alerted me to the top third of my screen and I’d forgotten how personally I could take the death of a fictional character since I played Spec Ops: The Line. Games that leave you with a sense of wretchedness are few and far between. If an NPC were to die in Dark Souls you would not bat an eyelid, yet this felt much the same as the red wedding scene in Game of Throne as you sit there helpless to a conflict you sit in the middle of.
As the days went on I also found it easy to become agitated with the populace, which I will reiterate is with fictional characters of a game (something I had to remind myself), as certain days would require tickets to be shown at the checkpoint, and I found one or two people that would ‘forget’ to show their ticket, eating up your valuable time, as you see the hand s of the small clock begin to mock you like the mad hatter. You become that bus conductor, that guy on the train serving food, taking abuse off parties of drunk people, tired of the mundane. Pissed off you will be shouting, “NEXT!” at the monitor.
I felt compelled to play on but the threat of it happening again sat on my shoulder but these rushes of emotion, of quick action, are outnumbered by the dull, tedious days were looking at dates, and logos can leave you aching for another event, and without perseverance it is easy to turn the game off and continue from the start of the day another time.
Less than a week into policing the line I had witnessed a lot but the motherland does not stop for one man; I had been given more power and recent news of a murder coincided with my new ability: to detain criminals. Pull this off and the sense of pride buries its way to your heart, your Arstotzka ancestors would be looking down on you. It is one more rewarding feature that explains your attraction this characterful simulation. This element of the game - gaining new ways to dispatch the fakers and the crooks with new equipment as they become more devious - is frequent, to the point where you become the Judge Dredd‘s Communist brother: muttering the words ‘I am the law’ as you adjudicate.
Any player can tackle the game in a different way; at one point I was called on by a young woman. When I approved her passport, she left with the words ‘Help me’ and a letter. This scribbled hand-written document told me that she was in danger from another man in the queue. Now, this could have easily been ignored; but she struck a chord with my heroic nature. The dilemma I was left with was: do I take the burn and accept the penalty for not letting the man in? Or do I let him through? He had the correct documents, after all. To prevent his entry would negatively affect my wages; my family were starving, I was having difficulty paying the rent; but if I allowed him passage, that woman would be in danger.
Events like this test your character as a human being. The game will decide your outcome out of the twenty endings available by the dilemmas you face and the actions you take to resolve them. This adaptability means that even after you’ve completed the game, you’ll go back for another. You can compare with friends; you can discuss the decisions you made and how
you struggled to keep your wife warm at night.
‘First it giveth, Then it taketh away.’
By the end of the first week there were so many documents to cross reference: check the name on on three different documents. Check the date of birth, compare it to the ID card. Check both pictures, check ticket due date, check passport expiry date, finger print, body scan…
The monotony of it all becomes real and, at least for me, letting people slip through was inevitable. After two penalties, each subsequent error results in a deduction of five credits from your daily wages. On a day that I received four penalties, I also incurred higher rent and my son became ill. Medicine cost five dollars, but I didn’t have a penny to my name. My son was going to die. My son, who is not real, was going to die and I was in despair. Curse you Papers, Please. Curse you.
Papers, Please is one of a kind, by one Lucas Pope. It’s inimitable and the closest you’ll get to the grey dullness and tedium in real life is actually working for the Transportation Security Administration in America, who enforce full body scans, shoe scans and pat-downs at airports. Your emotions will be snatched away from you one moment, only for you to be drowned by them the next. Games allow you to experience another life. None will make you feel more happy for leading a normal life than this.
‘Glory to Arstotzka.’
