Heavy spoilers in this review. Rating 10/10

Papers, Please perfectly achieves the atmosphere it is striving to convey. The game is set in the fictional land of Arstotzka, surrounded by various similar countries, obviously inspired by the Eastern Bloc, communist countries of Europe and Asia which existed during the Cold War. Arstotzka itself is also cold, with the colors of the world, peered at through your window, being almost exclusively muted and tonally uninteresting. This dullness is then contrasted nicely with the bright red and green stamps that you use to conduct your duties.

In Papers, Please, you play as a checkpoint inspector drafted into service and relocated by the government with your family. You only get a glimpse of yourself one time during the game, when you are provided with a family portrait of you, your wife, child, and other relatives. Up until this point, it is easy to think of yourself as machine, working to further to goals of Arstotzka, and indeed, it seems the country is happy for you to think of yourself this way, existing as nothing more than a mindless drone, carrying out the repetitive task of checking individuals’ documents and determining whether or not to grant them access to the “glorious” country of Arstotzka.

However, Papers, Please requires the player to be much more than a mindless drone. The game is, quite simply, very challenging, as even the most basic task seems to require a concentration of effort not usually required by such video games. Everything must be paid attention to for anything could be wrong with any document. This, I think, is the greatest marvel of the game’s design. Just about anything you could imagine being wrong with any of the more than half a dozen documents that the player is presented with can be incorrect. You spend your time scouring line after line, comparing one thing to another, hoping beyond hope that you have checked everything that could be checked and finally, making the decision to send the individual before you through, only to wait, nervously, to see if that awful fax machine sound triggers, indicating that a mistake was made. It is inevitable that mistakes will be made, and Papers, Please knows this for the punishment is light, at first. It takes time to get used to a new position and the leadership of the state take pity on your situation. But this only extends to a point, as the game grows harsher and harsher the more clumsy you are.

The difficulty of the game is increased incrementally and expertly. Each day, the dread of encountering a new rule to be remembered or a new document to be learned looms over the player. By the end of the game, the player must balance more and more documents at once and verify the veracity of all information contained therein. At times, questions must be asked, clarifications made, and inspections conducted. Every number matters and no amount of replaying will help you memorize the procedurally-generated, unending stream of individuals flowing into the Grestin Border Checkpoint where you work. You don’t want it to be harder. As I said, each day, you dread going in to find some new rule has been added, but by the end of the game, when confidently handling multiple documents, when you’ve found a rhythm to searching for discrepancies and a pattern for checking even the most minute of details, each check painfully reinforced by a previous failure to check that particular minutia, Papers, Please really brings the player a level of satisfaction rarely matched by even the most complex of video games.

On top of the difficulty, Papers, Please also subtly encourages the player not just to be careful, but also to be fast. Quick and efficient is the name of the game. After all, you have a family to feed and house and keep warm every night. Each individual processed through the checkpoint means more money, and more money means less of a chance of any of your family starving or freezing to death. Add to this the fact that Papers, Please has events of cruel misfortune which rob the player of precious amounts of what little money they have and each day the player is possessed by an almost frenzied urge to process as many people as possible so as to build up their cash reserve. The game even goes so far as to reward the cold-hearted player who methodically freezes or starves his family for a day at a time so as to save that money to be used the next day. This leads to a conundrum. On the one hand, you need to process people as fast as possible. On the other hand, it is difficult to ensure all of the would-be boarder crossers’ paperwork is in order in such a short amount of time. The net result is, again, a desire by the player to increase one’s skill, to get better at checking documents, to craft a better system of doing so, a better mental checklist to use when verifying information. And then, the game adds another thing to check and the process starts over again.

Papers, Please also has a story. It is a layered one, comprised of a greater plot of deception, assassination, and political intrigue supplemented by dozens of smaller stories encountered daily by the player as they work each day. You never know which will happen next; a spy working against the government could approach or a woman who doesn’t have the correct documents and just wants to return to her lover. “How ruthless do you want to be?” the game seems to ask, and then, and this is rare, it allows the player to be as ruthless as they want. Outside of being confined physically by the box of the document inspector, you can do whatever you want in Papers, Please. Would you like to steal from people? You can. Would you like to arrest people? You are incentivized to do so. Would you like to assist a literal child-rapist in escaping vigilante justice for his crime. You may do so as well. Papers, Please does not condone these actions, and I would say, for the most part, the morally reprehensible actions are less rewarded (mostly that is), but it is important that the choice is there. The world of Arstotzka is a cruel, dog-eat-dog world and if you determine screwing others over for a shot at freedom or even another day of survival is worth it, you may make it so.

There are twenty endings to Papers, Please, some obviously better than others and many morally better than others, but none unreservedly desirable to obtain. What I mean is that even to get the objectively happiest endings the game has to offer, bleak decisions have to be made. Someone has to be screwed over at some point, and if its not you, it will be others. The game reinforces this early on by punishing the overeager player who tries to do what is ultimately a good thing, accepting money from a secret organization in order to overthrow the government, by taking the money away almost immediately and putting them in a stressful situation to get out of it. Arstotzka could be accurately described as a bad place to live and, oftentimes, an unwavering commitment to survival must outweigh one’s moral principles, as was the case for many caught up in the real Eastern Bloc conflicts and secret police.

I have, in the end, no complaints with Papers, Please. It is a rewarding game which capitalizes on its concept to the furthest extent possible, encouraging the player, either by rewards or punishments, to obtain a mastery of its simple system made ever more complex by the rules, documents, and exceptions of the checkpoint handbook. Aesthetically, the game is perfect, with the visuals, gameplay, and even music adding a sense of mundanity and cold despair that the nightmare of this life and job may never end by anything other than prison or death. And through all of this, the hope at the end of the tunnel grows brighter, encouraging the player to continue to learn, continue to perfect his skill, in order to do what so many in such situations have striven to do before above all else – survive.