Time Limits? Endless Mode? etc

[Astrolibrarian™]

i read the description at the sale page, sounded interesting.
Then i watched the movie...hilarious, really really awesome!
Clearly it has tons of good reviews too, but i have questions:

1. I get the impression players are basically stamping DENIED on everyone, rarely if ever letting anyone in ("No foreigners")...what's to stop me from just denying all quickly?
I'm good at finding hidden things, unlike FPS or platformers, but if i see something like a fake passport, can i just DENY, or do i have to go through the rulebook & find arbitrarily made-up things?? I have trouble getting into fictional settings, real history's more interesting, but if the gameplay's funny or anything like the video, i'm down.

2. Endless Mode: Is it hard to last, or can you play indefinitely'?
Is this game roguelike in the sense that if i do everything 'right', i can still lose randomly, or no? Does the difficulty scale in Endless?
I know the game has alternate endings & story...just wondering if Endless Mode is interesting enough to make me come back to a saved game 1-2 years later, or if this is more of a 10 hour game & that's it.

3. I see crosshairs & rioters. How's this part work? Move the cursor & shoot?
Is that mode easy/hard/variable? That is, are there group attacks or crowds?

4. How does the time limit work?
I hate time limits. This may be the 1 thing that stops me from buying, i can't think of any timed game i like. Can you easily lose to timers in P,P ? Or is it more like a day cycle you can improve yourself against?

5. How bad/good is the Game Control? (Most important factor for me!!)
If a game makes me nitpick details & sort thru piles of menus, i can live w/that...
..IF i can easily do what i want without struggling to use a mouse for list-picking.
Almost every game i play has rebindable keys...to me Game Control's more important than graphics, music, even Story.

[⎛⎝kingj0n⎠⎞]

It's a job you do not get paid to do.

[Astrolibrarian™]

That bad huh?

[PirateDaveZOMG]

Allow me to answer your questions as best as possible:

1. There is a fairly even balance of people you allow and people you deny. To subvert your concerns on this, DENYing someone who can rightfully enter gives you the same negative consequence as ALLOWing someone who shouldn't. Semi-Spoiler: For a small chunk of the game, you can DENY once you see an inconsistency, like in your example, however you will eventually have to go through the rulebook and pick out the specific reason once your country establishes that new policy

2. There are a few different endless modes, each for which you can pick a differing amount of deocuments you'll need to check, so the answer to this question is not very definitive. Semi-Spoiler: I will say, that Endless Mode does not include any of the RPG elements of the main story and is strictly the 'Spot the Difference' gameplay endlessly played.

3. That part only occurs a few times, and is not very demanding, but yes it is point and click. Time is more of a factor, but I don't feel it's overly challenging.

4. The time limit is a fairly constant challenge in Papers, Please. You are paid for the number of entrants you see each day, so obviously seeing as many as possible should be your goal, which is the natural enemy to being thorough in observing documents. I think this may be *challenging* at first, but as/if you start to memorize the specifics about the different countries, it becomes more of the 'Improve yourself" mechanic you were talking about. There is also an "Easy Mode" checkbox which will give you an extra 20 credits a day, so that you don't have to rush so much and suffer the possible consequences of that.

5. The ease of use and quality of life controls is actually something upgradeable in the game, so you may be frustrated as you say at a certain point. Semi spoiler: For example, activating the "Inspection Mode" which you will use for the majority of your gameplay usually requires clicking a button on you desk. Eventually you can 'buy' an upgrade that allows you to activate it with the SPACE Bar, making it much easier, but this begs the question of why you couldn't have done this in the first place.

Hope that helped, this really is a fun game.

[Astrolibrarian™]

Hmm that's interesting about the upgrades...
Thanks, your answers help a lot!