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I really feel like this game is establishing a new genre, because I don't know of anything quite like it. The Bureaucracy-em-up.
You take on the role of a border check-point processing drone, in what feels like an early 80's Soviet satellite country. Your job is the soul-crushing drudgery of processing hopeful applicants to your (fictional) country of Arstotzka.
Your job is to weed out all applications who do not file their papers in the exact way demanded. Name misspelled? DENIED. Discrepancy between your id and your papers? DENIED. Do your papers have the wrong sex listed? DENIED. More restrictions come in to play later.
You have to process enough applicants each and every day to make enough money to pay your rent, provide food for your family, and pay for heat. Other factors will play in to this later.
The graphics are very primitive, almost like something that would come from the time that the game is set in. It's strangely fitting.
The music is simple, but quite catchy, and incredibly fitting.
There really isn't much to this game, but everything is there that needs to be there. It has this strangely addictive quality, just trying to make it through another day, hoping that you make enough money to get by just one more day. It gets strangely intense, knowing that Big Brother is watching, grading your performance. If you let too many people through who shouldn't, there will be penalties. Penalties that you just can not afford.
I wound up feeling a strange antipathy towards the people I was processing through my checkpoint. I hated them for coming, dreading how they would mess up their paperwork, costing me precious moments I could be using to process more people, to say nothing of the people who could actually be a threat to the country, and more immediately, my checkpoint.
This is an incredible achievement for an indie game, and it deserves to be played, if for no other reason than the fact that I'm fairly certain there's nothing out there quite like it.
8/10
