What I never got is why who ever is giving us the citations doesn’t just do this job himself, if he’s so fucking smart.

My sociology professor actually assigned us this game when we were learning about Weber and bureaucracy. It’s a fascinating play.

I use a printed out sheet with issuing cities and valid emblems to play since my screen is small. I think I'd make a good border security guard.

This is literally just having a job, but without being paid.

The biggest crime I see is how far out of bounds you are stamping these passports

I love this game. It's hard as balls. I love the guy that keeps coming back with handmade paperwork.

One of the most terrifying aspects of this game is that at first you try to give the benefit of the doubt to the entrants, giving them another chance and allowing them to correct their mess-ups... until you realize that you spend too much time doing this useless stuff, so you start to just deny everyone with the slightest discrepancy, even when they have all the papers and just forgot to put one of them on the desk right away. Surely you would roll in cash, but at the cost of becoming a typical heartless bureaucrat.

For the sake of correctness: Arstotzka is not "basically Russia", in aesthetics and lore it is much closer to an expy of Yugoslavia. In particular, backstory of Arstotzkan-Kolechian war has many heavy references to Serbian-Croatian war.

"Well guys, we're not eating today. You'll live." made me crack up thinking of a guy in a business suit coming home and immediately saying that

This is like three games now I’ve bought because of your recommendations, worth it haha

Papers Please is a great game about moral ambiguity, where doing the right thing can be really hard and even break you. This, however, is negated if you get really good at scanning passports, which is what I did.

Ps: a game in a sorta kinda similar category as this that I like was “This is the Police” where you’re a police chief and you decide who to hire and fire (with hard limits, and often getting political pressure to hire or fire certain types)

I believe George Orwell said it best:

One of my favorite parts is when one of the guards comes by and is just like, hey I get a bonus every time you detain someone so you detain more people and I’ll split the bonus with you, and from that point on you have the option to detain people for almost any discrepancy not just criminal ones. It’s great because even if you decide that no you are not going to stoop that low, there’s still that brief moment where you way the options anyways because you could really use the money and some idiot with expired paperwork is just being a total jerk to you.

I love the concept of Papers, Please, but I'm loathe to actually play it myself. It's too similar to when I used to work at a convenience store and had to ID people for alcohol and tobacco purchases. Shit gets stressful when you have people without IDs copping an attitude at you, while at the same time you have "secret shoppers" that can and will squeal on you to the authorities if you neglect this task (a former co-worker of mine was fired due to this).