I wanted to like Papers Please. I liked it’s theme and attention to detail but it went too far. It crossed from having to be attentive to straight up sadism. It quickly became a chore of having to watch out for too many different variables and the punishments stacking up. One could say this is realistic to life in a totalitarian country but in the end games are still supposed to be fun. I liked how you have to pick what to spend what money you have and deal with the consequences. I enjoyed having to check regional maps for cities of issue. I found the buttons to interrogate and to check correlated data a bit clunky which is a bad thing when you’re on the clock. I think the game had a surprising amount of story and different endings based on various criteria.
I played Papers Please on Linux. It never crashed on me. It does require version 2.29 or higher of glibc so not every distro will run it. The game crashed on Trisquel due to this but ran on Manjaro. There is no manual save options, it saves at the beginning of each day. Alt-Tab works. There are no graphics options.
Game Engine: Unknown
Game Version Played: 1.2.69
Save System: Auto
Disk Space Used: 80 MB
GPU Usage: 5-17 %
CPU Usage: 1-2 %
RAM Usage: 1.6-1.7 GB
I can see how this could have been a game I enjoyed but it was too much thrown at you. It seemed like a Dark Souls or Super Meat Boy of the simulator genre. Something you can’t relax to but need to stay on edge for. This may be fun for some but not for me.
My Score: 5.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | Gigabyte R9 270 2GB | Mesa 20.2.1 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.2 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.9-3-MANJARO