31. There is no Game
32.
Papers, Please: oppressive communist misery simulator.
For anyone who doesn't know what this is, you're a border guard for a fictional Cold War-era eastern european country called Arstozka and you're tasked with allowing/denying entry to your glorious country for all the poor, trudging saps queueing for your attention every morning.
Checking someone's papers starts out easy with only a passport to look at, but the complexity ramps up every day with the paranoid administration introducing more and more paperwork hoops for entrants to jump through; and thus for you to check. After denying or rejecting someone you're given a penalty if you screwed up. The first two each day are just warning but any subsequent mistakes cost you five credits from your wages each time. Which is crucial because you've got an entire family depending on your to keep them warm, fed and filled with medicine for the round of lurgies they seem to all catch at the drop of a fucking hat. Ultimately this is a balancing act because people will ask you to help them in various ways which will always involve wrongly allowing/denying someone's entry so you're weighing these morally positive decisions against the income they'll cost you and the impact that'll have on your family.
There is also an over-arching plot that runs through the game involving a shadowy resistance movement which you can choose to get involved with or not, and some characters that pop-up regularly to help give an impression of an actual narrative.
Obviously the core of the game is repetitive and somewhat mind-numbing but that's true to the theme and, if you're weird like me, there's a lot of 'fun' to be had from correctly applying all the rules. The 'side missions' and dialogue with the entrants also helps to keep it from becoming boring. It could be argued that it goes on for a bit too long because you've seen pretty much all of the game's tricks well before the final day approaches. There are shitloads of endings and different decisions you can make so I did appreciate the ability to replay the game from any day you've already completed so you can see some of the different outcomes without replaying the whole thing.
Also, I don't know if I'm just awful at it or if it's genuinely really difficult but I can't see how you'd be able to keep your entire family alive. In the end I managed to escape with my son and wife, but uncle and mother-in-law were sacrificed very early on; and I had zero hope of ever helping out my niece.
Overall: unique, funny, interesting but perhaps a tad too long.
33.
INSIDE: I had a hankering to replay this and, a couple of annoying puzzles aside, it's just as incredible as I remember. Seriously, if you haven't played this you're doing yourself a real disservice.
What I'd managed to completely forget somehow was the atmosphere of the thing; I'm struggling to think of any game that could even touch it in that regard. The environments are properly haunting most of the way through but it's the sound design that's the real star of the show here. The audio's just so subtle and effective that there were times I paused the game thinking some aspect of the sound was coming from my flat or outside the window. Less is definitely more here and I was blown away anew by that aspect of the game.