Papers, Please (PC) (2013)

"The Pink Vice - For All Your Fantasies!"

Overview: Papers, Please is a game where you're an immigration inspector checking documents for entrance into Arstotzka.

At the beginning, the rules are simple and you only have to make sure the person has a passport. However, as the game progresses, more and more rules and checks must be made.

Sometimes shit gets real and you have choices to make.

For example, all the documentation information has to match up, the photo and other personal information (height, weight, and gender) also has to match up, and the passport has to be issued from a legitimate area.

20141012:
When I first watched trailers for this game, I thought it looked really fun and easy to play. Unfortunately, the game is quite hard!

They always know when I make an error.
(That doesn't make sense!)

Under a lot of pressure to process documents for my hungry and sick family, I started to process faster and faster, only to miss out on fine details and face more and more citations.

However, the game will be easier to play the next time, as I will be more familiar with what needs to be done.

Ah. Don't worry, you're replaceable.

One small micromanagement that might be possible is stamping a document with the suspected answer (approve or deny) and then correcting it as necessary.*

*I recall an instance of correcting the stamp and it worked and I remember an instance of correcting the stamp and it didn't work, so I don't know how reliable this strategy would be.

My stats.

20141013:
I played some more today. While the game saves on a day to day basis, so you can start from any of the days, I started over from the beginning.

While I didn't play as much as yesterday, I like the gameplay and the story. In particular, it trains a type of recognition skill that typically isn't required in puzzle games.

The issuing city is one of the harder checks.

Finally, while writing this post, I came up with the following idea: perhaps the easiest way to play the game would be to keep playing a specific day until you get good at it. This would optimize the amount of money you have going into the next day, and when you're satisfied, you can continue on to the next day.

20230720:
Steam Game Time: 92 minutes (cumulative game time)
Last Played: 20141013

20230721:
Today I tried playing this game on the Steam Deck. I thought it would be an advantage to use the touch screen as an interface but it was not. Sometimes the touch controls were unresponsive and it was hard to flip through the manual. I think, though some would consider it a cheat, that having these pages available on a separate screen would be nice.

Steam Game Time: 2.2 hours (cumulative game time) / 0.7 hours (session game time)

20230722 Comment:
I read some (possible) tips:
- one doesn't have to always interrogate; depending on the discrepancy
- there is at most one discrepancy per person walking through (so once the player detects an handles a person, that's enough)
- one can take advantage and just let people through quicker than the time it takes to interrogate (the first two errors in a day get a warning, and subsequently there is a penalty, but the player still earns a net profit)

[20230722][20231021 Edit]

20230722:
Based on playing the game more (on my desktop), to me cheating by having some a cheatsheet on a second screen has its benefits. Among the benefits is allowing me, the player, to progress and experience more of the game by lowering the game's difficulty. Reflecting, in the past I generally had no qualms about using guides whenever I got stuck in a game (especially since I would simply make a note that a guide was being used). However, there were a few instances where I opted not to use a guide, but comparing the two scenarios (using vs. not using a guide when stuck), I think there was a higher chance that I end up leaving a game when choosing not to use a guide, because the fun of the game wears out. By extension, many forms of cheating enable the extension of fun in a game (as an aside, one might believe there are various degrees of cheating). For me, a prime example of a time when I cheated and clearly extended the fun of a game ocurred when I used GPS spoofing in Pokemon GO; I was ready to stop playing the game, but the spoofing made the game exciting and breathed new life into the game for me. Returning to Papers, Please, using a cheatsheet or two removed the primary source of stress out of the game, and consequently I was able to enjoy parts of the story, I would not have otherwised reached. Interestingly, a common alternatively nowadays is to not even play the game oneself, and just go watch someone else play it (e.g., on Twitch or YouTube).

tl;dr: using cheatsheets extended the fun of the game for me; as a measure, I've more than doubled the total amount of time I've put into the game

Remark: technically the stress of the game is, in this case, clearly intended by the developers.

[20230722][20231021 Edit]
Steam Game Time: 5.1 hours (cumulative game time) / 2.9 hours (session game time)

Papers, Please (PC) (2013)