It is here that the protagonist’s guilt catches up with him, and we are treated to a scene of his own silent self-recrimination (he puts the locket next to the photograph of his own family). Our inspector rejects her, as per the rules, only to receive a heart-locket he is to pass onto Sergiu.
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This is played for full drama: Sergiu the guard had earlier begged the inspector to approve Elisa – but, as it turns out, she lacks the necessary papers. This cold, bureaucratic calm runs head-long into the second dilemma, where the inspector rejects the lover of one of his guard friends.
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The inspector rejects him, of course, but as the man walks out, we see the official’s face reflected in the glass, staring back at him in the booth – a visual comment of “there, but for the grace of God go I.” We are then treated to a series of approvals/denials in quick succession, reaffirming that the inspector is Just Doing His Job, and that he has become quite desensitised to the process, even if there are very real consequences for the people on the other side of the glass.
The film’s first sob-story is a man whose permit expired three days earlier, but who has (or claims to have) been trying for a job for four months, with a family. That sort of monstrous behaviour doesn’t fly the moment you introduce real people. Confession: in my first win with the game, I went to the extraordinary step of deliberately letting all but one family member die, just to minimise daily costs. I think this is a theme that might actually be better suited to film than game format: I personally find there is a much greater emotional toll when you are screwing over an actual human than if you are screwing over a collection of pixels. The protagonist inspector, who has a family of his own, must process a line of desperate people, with families of their own – with all the associated sob stories. The film is Russian language, with English subtitles.Ĭonsidering that the entire film is a mere ten minutes, the thing does an excellent job at distilling the essence of the game: the interface between the demands of faceless bureaucracy and the needs of living, breathing humans. Oh, and you have a dependent family to feed too.Īnyway, as of this weekend, the game has spawned a short film adaptation on Youtube, and it is this I am reviewing today. The objective of the game is to let people with correct paperwork in, keep the forgers and crooks out, and navigate your way through some murky moral dilemmas with terrorists and the secret police breathing down your neck. In 2013, an independent game developer by the name of Lucas Pope put out Papers, Please, a self-described “Dystopian Document Thriller,” where you get to play a border checkpoint official in the fictional authoritarian state of Arstotzka during late 1982.
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