Red Gems, Please.

[woekitten]

whatifoundthere recently shared some magnificent insight on Papers, Please, "A Dystopian Document Thriller." Papers, Please is a time-management game of sorts that you "play" as a border guard for a grim, grey eastern European country at the height of the Cold War. True to life, corruption and bribery abound, and there is no right or wrong way to get through the

Comments

[whatifoundthere]

Thanks for the correction. I work pretty hard to avoid spoilers so I just played with what I saw -- the opening scene has "insurgents" in kaffiyehs shouting at each other in Persian and you shoot them all, and there's a radio transmission calling for help in English, and you find a whole bunch of dead Americans and are sad about it, and you are playing a white guy in a team of white guys, and so I just got disgusted and assumed that the whole game was more of the same.

I don't intend on playing the game any more so I read the plot on Wikipedia and I see that the whole thing is a commentary on Heart of Darkness. OK. I do think part of my point still stands -- that opening scene is clearly designed to create an expectation that is later questioned, but I reject the entire setup since the PC's team is just as much a representative of American colonialism, in my mind, as the Kurtz character. Seems I'm not the only one who thinks so; some other critics are quoted in Wikipedia as saying that an FPS is not really the place for moral ambiguity since you're still spending all your time killing dudes, and creating an artificial guilt complex on top of a killing-dudes mechanic suggests to me that the best way to deal with the issues in the game is not to play it. And if MAYBE WE ARE THE MONSTERS!!! is the takeaway from this, then eh, I could've told them that.

[kaiser_tbd]

I think it was the writer who said the secret good ending was the one where you put down the controller and never played it again. Not because it's a bad game, but because it's a painful, abrasive one.

But, whatever. This post isn't about The Line.

I'm picking up Papers, Please today. I've heard too much good stuff now, even though my hard drive creaks under the weight of Steam sales and Humble Bundles. Thanks for the commentary~

...Also should arrange time for another playthrough of Terranigma. I think it's my favorite SNES game, but that's a tough choice.