Papers, Please

Lucas Pope's dystopian document thriller Papers, Please is, on the face of it, a puzzle game about catching people out, but I think it's actually a game about coping with being punched in the gut, over and over again, with the relentlessly regular beat of a bass saxhorn playing a slow march rhythm.

Bowm! Bowm! Bowm! Bowm!

Amid the stress of trying to catch travellers out as an immigration officer working at the border crossing between fictional Eastern Bloc-style countries Kolechia and Arstotzka (glory to Arstotzka), Papers, Please forces you to decide the fate of not only strangers, but your loved ones. It is impossible to earn enough money to feed, heat and nurse your entire family. So you must decide who should live and who should die in your house. My wife is cold, sick and hungry. My son is cold and very sick. My mother-in-law and uncle are already dead. My son will die without medicine. If I spend the $5 I have spare after paying rent on medicine for him, my wife will probably get very sick and die. Both will get very cold because I can't afford to pay for heating.

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BioShock™

OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

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Papers, Please

The Papers, Please short film is out now on YouTube (and Steam shortly). Have a gander at the 10-minute flick below.

The film absolutely nails the look, sound and feel of the superb dystopian document thriller, with a cool nod to the quick-fire puzzle element of the game. The wonderful metronome music from the game makes it into the film, too.

Like the video game, the Papers, Please film is a border control thriller. The unnamed inspector from the video game is played by Igor Savochkin, a Russian actor who starred in Leviathan and Night Watch. Like the game, the film is set entirely at the Grestin border control checkpoint, and references the fictional community country Arstotzka.

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Papers, Please

Lucas Pope turned down Uncharted 3. He found a seat at Naughty Dog during the development of the first Uncharted and stuck around for Uncharted 2, but when Drake's third outing rocked up, he left the studio because he wanted to experiment with smaller, weirder games. Those experiments would eventually lead to Papers, Please, one of the finest games of 2013 and, to most people, Pope's first name. His last name is guy.

Today, the Papers, Please guy is hard at work on another experiment: Return of the Obra Dinn. Pitched as a death-fuelled mystery adventure set aboard an abandoned trade ship, Obra Dinn first surfaced in 2014, just as Pope was polishing off the bulk of Papers, Please. It's still not out. It might not be out this year. To understand why, you have to back much further than 2014, all the way back to the '90s, to a small town in Virginia where a young Pope finds himself enamoured with a Macintosh and Quake mods.

"I started out doing skins mostly, because that was easy," Pope tells me over Skype from his home in Tokyo, Japan. "You could just open up a 2D file and draw one and then you could see it in 3D. It was fucking amazing. Then I got involved with a couple guys on the internet who were making small commercial mods. Sony had the idea to make a Quake mod to promote [the film Anaconda]. I hooked up with the guy who was doing that and did a couple of skins for him."

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