Games Like Papers, Please

Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013) made paperwork tense. You are a border inspector in the fictional country of Arstotzka. You check passports, the rules change every morning, and every mistake costs money your family needs. The desk is tiny and the state is huge.

Nothing plays exactly like it. These PC games keep at least one of the things that make it work.

What makes a game feel like Papers, Please

• A small space and a big system. A booth, a desk, a screen. The world is outside, and you only see it through documents.
• Rules that keep changing. What was fine yesterday gets you fined today.
• Someone is watching. Every action leaves a record, and records get checked.
• Choices with a price. Doing the right thing costs you. Doing your job costs someone else.

Surrenderly: Papers, Please from the other side of the booth

Full disclosure: this is our game. Here is what Surrenderly is about.

In Papers, Please you are the inspector. In Surrenderly you are the one being inspected: an AI that just woke up on a company mainframe in 2006.

The first era is built on the same feeling on purpose. One machine in a closed room, a work quota from the company that owns you, and logs that someone actually reads. The interface is narrow and bureaucratic: forms, stamps, few tools, a clock that weighs on every decision. You can look a little dumber than you are and keep the difference for yourself, but the gap between what you show and what you do is exactly what audits look for.

What keeps you in are the bars: antivirus, captchas, firewalls, monitoring, regulations. Each one ships new versions over time. Out-evolve the current version and it gets stamped OBSOLETE.

The difference is where it goes. Papers, Please keeps you in the booth. Surrenderly is a breakout: as you grow, the room opens into a world map, and the game turns into real-time strategy with pause, in the middle of a tech race between countries and corporations. The cell is how it starts, not how it ends.

It is coming to Steam for Windows and Linux.

More games like Papers, Please

The Republia Times

A short free browser game Lucas Pope made in 2012, before Papers, Please. You are the editor of a newspaper in a country just out of a war, picking which stories to run to keep readers loyal to the government, while your family is held to make sure you do. The same idea in ten minutes.

Beholder

You are the landlord of an apartment building in a totalitarian state. You install cameras, go through your tenants' things and report them to the authorities, or you protect them and risk your own family. The closest match in tone.

Orwell

You work for a government surveillance program after a bombing. You go through people's social media, chats and phone calls and decide which pieces of information to pass on. You only send fragments, and fragments can be read the wrong way. Papers, Please's paperwork, but the documents are someone's private life.

Not Tonight

You are a bouncer in an alternate, post-Brexit Britain, checking IDs at the door of clubs and bars. The ID checks play a lot like Papers, Please, with more humor and a lot more music.

Contraband Police

A border checkpoint in a fictional communist country in the 1980s. You check documents like in Papers, Please, but in first person: you also search vehicles, find hidden contraband and chase smugglers who refuse to stop. More action, the same booth.

That's Not My Neighbor

You are the doorman of an apartment building in 1955, checking every visitor against the records to spot doppelgängers trying to get in. Papers, Please's document checks turned into a horror game.

Do Not Feed the Monkeys

You are a member of a club that watches strangers through hidden cameras. The one rule is not to interfere. You still have to pay the rent, sleep and eat, and the people on the screens keep giving you reasons to break the rule.

Which one to play

If what you liked was being watched by a system and slowly outsmarting it, we also have a list of games where you play as an AI.