Papers, Please (Let's look at some free games and that)

[The Rogerer]

I thought I'd make a thread for something we could all check out for free that everybody can get something out of


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QP5X6fcukM

Papers Please: A Dystopian Document Thriller. You can download the game for PC or Mac at http://dukope.com/ - it's only about 12MB and is still a work in progress but it's worth playing now, before it eventually gets onto Steam. They used to have a version you could play in a browser but it was extremely basic and more of a tutorial/concept.

The basic concept is that you work in a booth at border control. People will arrive with their passports. If everything looks fine, you can stamp it approved. Otherwise, you can flick through your (virtual) rule book and use the red button in the corner to highlight discrepancies and you can then ask the person about it, but they'll usually come up with a bullshit excuse. You try to process as many in a day as possible, getting payment for each successful applicant, until you get home and the stark menu lets you know how your life is going. You have rent, food, and heating to pay for, and if you've done well enough at work that's okay, but if not you have some simple sacrifices to make and you get to see the effects on your family. The bureaucracy starts to pile up each day, and you get fined once you're past your third error. This piles more pressure onto the gameplay, but also reinforces the story aspect of the game. The citizens passing through the border are not happy people. You'll get one or two lines of text from some and you start to learn about abuses where people have had their passports seized, people being trafficked. If you haven't made any mistakes that day, you can make a judgement call and deny someone, but if it's going to cost you money and things are already falling apart at home, you might sacrifice your opportunity to stop something bad happening. Either that, or you can just shut yourself off from the world, the things happening in newspapers, and process everything like a drone. Having two free errors gives you a taste of power that you'll probably want to use.

I wanted to share this game here because it did that job so well. The game doesn't overblow things and it absolutely makes it work. Seeing that your family is suffering in cold text is more affecting than if you had some awful child actor coughing. I hoped I would do better each day, and I resented these idiots who would queue up with their stupid expired documents, never mind the criminals. I haven't gotten all the way through the 30 days yet, I stopped playing last night, partly because I felt I was getting into a hole that I couldn't dig out of. I will pick that up though, starting the game again and doing my best to 'win' this time wouldn't feel quite right. This isn't Quantum Leap.

[MMH]

That looks just about strange enough to give it a go.

[The_Mike]

A Dystopian Document Thriller.

Sold!

EDIT: Oh shit, I let a woman through and she blew up the fucking airport.

[Hlebsfall]

If you like that, you should give Cart Life a try, its also a pretty grim game. (And free)

http://www.richardhofmeier.com/cartlife/

[Hlebsfall]

WRONG THREAD.

[The Rick]

Interesting game.

[The Rogerer]

Funnily enough, they've just done a full site where you can guess how much the full game is going to cost when released

http://papersplea.se/

[The_Mike]

Thanks for the recommendation, Rogerer. I love little indie gems like this. Very stylistic and atmospheric, and the music is pretty awesome. I played through the demo and found myself really learning on the job but also under a lot of pressure. If you want to meet your family's needs, you've got to process travellers swiftly, but it becomes so easy to miss that little detail. And twice people got past me with perfect paperwork and blew something up. Kind of feels like there's nothing I can do that will ever be good enough. It's a pretty bleak game, but compelling and kinda charming at the same time.

One idiot kept trying to get past me, every day or two. He even made his own passport and drew it in what looks like crayon. I started to look forward to his visits, strangely. Then some guy slipped me a piece of paper on the final day of the demo, and on the back of it was the name of a traveller who I guess was part of some resistance or cult. That traveller came up a little later but I didn't give him the paper, though I did admit him. Just wondering if anybody did it differently and what might have happened?

[The Rogerer]

I think things are pretty static in this version.

I never thought I could hand him the card. I just let him through. I assume this would have developed into something bigger as things went on. I did take a penalty for turning away the pimp, and I turned away the sportsman that was in the paper, but I wasn't sure what the best thing was there. I tried to find a way to detain him, but everything was probably in order. I suppose I was able to put a spanner in his getaway plan and he got arrested that day.
I think that's what I like about it - you can make your mark on the world but only through a very petty way.

[Matthew]

i liked this

rogerer:
you highlight his name and his name in the daily paper you get every morning. then it will give you the option to detain. if you do this, he says "fuck" and proclaims his innocence

[The Rogerer]

i liked this

rogerer:
you highlight his name and his name in the daily paper you get every morning. then it will give you the option to detain. if you do this, he says "fuck" and proclaims his innocenceI'm sure I had tried to highlight the morning bulletin in the past to no avail, but I guess it's the newspaper page, ha

[Matthew]

i have my recordbook open to the page of the rules for easy access. i dont really care about forgeries if they are issues from the wrong city in a country. i didnt realize how to highlight the rules until right near the end on the first run through

[MikeHunt]

This is great by the way. I've been playing it for fucking hours.

[Lagom]

Yeah, played it through, and cannot wait for the full game. $10 isn't bad for a game with this level of addictiveness.

[The_Mike]

This isn't a free game but it's the same price as the full version of Papers, Please and it is fairly big on the indy scene:

Gunpoint: A stealth game about rewiring things and punching people. (http://www.gunpointgame.com/)

I played the demo on Steam, seems like a lot of fun and with an interesting story.

[The Rogerer]

Just to let you know Papers, Please is out on Steam now, £6.99 for the full thing ($10 I think)

[Bert]

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-yP6dpluW-jc/Ugbw9hAiIiI/AAAAAAAABNQ/XF_NvfxVUxQ/s500/notamistake.gif

Not even sure if that will work but it's too big to just rehost with imgur and I don't feel like saving it and uploading it to my dropbox right now.

[Pete Cash]

Played through the demo version it was quite brilliant. I just became a drone. Oh this guy is involved in people smuggling but he's a citizen.....approved.

[turdpower]

Just bought the full thing. Awesome.

[turdpower]

I'm a bit annoyed about how my first story mode ended:

I ended up apparently accepting a bribe from some hooded bloke of 1000 credits. I don't really remember having a choice either, I just sort of got it at the end of the day.

Then I got the chance to move in to a nicer house so took it. Then my neighbours report me to the authorities for having too much money and I'm investigated and game over.

It's better than how the demo ended. I didn't realise you had to select food and heating and accidently killed my son. :lol:

[Pete Cash]

Yeah its the first way I lost. I now burn the money but I have read there is a way of keeping it. I am just playing a corrupt but loyalish border agent now. I will let the odd smuggler in....especially Jorji.

[The Rogerer]

I got the full version this morning. I presume the first few days are changed a bit from the demo, but you'll still have similar stuff in there to show you the ropes.

[turdpower]

Oh I found you can cheat a bit and each day is saved. So I just started playing before I got my bribe.

[MikeHunt]

Is there an end to it? I'm going to properly have a go at it this weekend.

[Pete Cash]

Yeah it ends one way or another after a month. The ending is based on the actions you take through the game.

You can get a positive ending even if you are a little bit corrupt as long as you don't help out the revolutionary group. I might play through and see if I can bring down the government. Its interesting how easy it is to fall into the trap of accepting bribes because you could do with the extra money. I like how he added a likable criminal like Jorji so you are more inclined to turn a blind eye. Its a clever little game.

[turdpower]

I killed some bloke who was red because I got told to.

Game over

[Grimario]

Given the title of this thread, I assume it's a good spot to put other free games.

Like Postmortem.

http://postmortemgame.com/

Blurb stolen from http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/08/10/postmortem/


In free JRPG-looking politic-em-up Postmortem you play Death, and you are on your way to a dinner party to kill someone. Your orders are to kill only one person, it doesn’t matter who; The Secretary has told you so. Perhaps the world has been encased in some sort of Malthusian Deadlock. But as you begin to develop an uncharacteristic curiosity about the guests, engage them in discussion, and investigate the documents and trinkets of the venue, you enact an oddly human bias. You realise that who you kill might have a greater impact than just having a waiter drop his hors d’oeuvres. But is your curiosity shifting history down another track? Is your very interest sending a cosmic ripple down the trouserleg of time? Right from the menu screen’s orchestral, foreboding, almost overbearing adaptation of Pop Goes The Weasel from Kevin MacLeod, you feel like whatever you do in this game, something awful is going to happen.

It’s October 18th, 1897, and local businessowner Bill Seldon is holding a Gala for a vandalised school. You enter the fundraiser to find various attendees with vocal political views: those with very firm ‘OldAger’ views of tradition and socialism, and ‘NewAger’ opinions of progress and capitalist ravagement. There have already been factories and small businesses blown up in protest by a militant arm of OldAgers who want fair wages and workers’ rights, and this Gala is not without tensions between patrons. They say never talk politics, religion or money at a party, but two of those three dominate affairs as you move from room to room, talking with guests and quietly judging them.

Postmortem is the brainchild of lead developer Jakub Kasztalski, whose interest in politics has strongly shaped Postmortem’s narrative and outcomes. Very text-heavy, Jakub’s background in Comparative Ethnic Conflict, which he studied in Northern Ireland, really shows through in the scraps of paper, leaflets and books you will read and the dialogue you will take part in throughout. “I’ve always loved videogame development. I used to work at a games studio for two years. And so a lot of what I learned [in my Masters in Ethnic Conflict] was inspirational to me personally,” Kasztalski says.

The transplanting of pronouns for fictional places and people like “Antrim”, “Thatcher”, and others might seem a tad hamfisted as signposts initially, but by the end of the game it becomes apparent that the narrative structure has been much more nuanced than you might have initially assumed, and point towards a deep awareness of real-world conflict and the paths nations can take. “It’s not so much whom you choose,” Kasztalski explains. “but how you choose, in the sense that… is it fair for me to decide? Who gives me the right? How much of an educated guess without education?” Interesting too, that in Kasztalski’s experience, games have done very little in the way of exploring how to resolve conflict without violence, or placed too much importance on a win/lose state. “A lot of my testers were looking at – how do we win? How do we fix the conflict, you know? That doesn’t surprise me,” Kasztalski muses. He goes on to cite The Walking Dead as a big inspiration, and talks of his ideas on implementing statistics at the end of the game so you can compare your choices with fellow players.

The complexity of Postmortem’s characters is especially noteworthy. Games have a real tendency to portray characters as being either palpably virtuous or sinister, but in Postmortem it is difficult to be put off by even the most extreme political views – not only are the characters written polite and conversational, but also they have a realistic mix of conservative and liberal thought processes, making concessions to some ideas, ruling others out, and sometimes even being particularly hypocritical. Of note is Ophelia Thatcher, whose views on women having better representation in politics and broadcast media is certainly laudable, and I felt myself nodding along, the first stirrings of Feminism and Votes For Women brewing in her and all that – and then later she makes remarks about how awful immigrants are. And I was suddenly reminded: people can be hypocritical and exist in power hierarchies – why is it so strange that this videogame character might hold hypocritical views, when they would in reality? The greatest triumph here is that the conversations you have are not leading in any manner and flow naturally, which happens little elsewhere in videogameland.

The structure of the game is interesting: when you eventually pick your murder, a series of newspaper stories then inform you of the fallout from the Gala event. When at last you are aware of how your presence as Death was interpreted by the guests (even the dead one), you come to understand how nuanced the conversation branches were, and how they were not exactly what you expected. There is a huge emphasis on freedom of choice. “A lot of people were like ‘Well what’s stopping people from picking a person and ending the game in two minutes?’” Kasztalski says. “And I was looking at them thinking, ‘Why should they be stopped’?” And it is a very replayable game, in terms of looking at the subtle outcomes that are interpreted by your choices.

Though the JRPG art and classical music is fairly rudimentary – Kasztalski tells me is constantly evolving as it is developed – the writing (though there is a lot of it, and it is quite dry) is good, laid on thick like political jam. It was refreshing to not be completely patronised by a game, to be treated like a critical reader. The only disappointment for me was that there weren’t more interesting artifacts to examine, more shocking mysteries to uncover, and that there weren’t more characters in the world to explore. It’s very short game, and though it must have taken a long time to construct, it only takes about an hour and a bit to play. I’m looking forward to this being polished up, and being held up as an example of how to write nuanced characters with a reach into complex late-game branching narratives. An excellent little slice of intrigue that is worth a look. It’s coming out later this month, entirely for free, perhaps with small bonus extras for a little donation.

[The Rick]

Free 8-bit Game of Thrones game


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x5ZVBwA5y0#t=51


link to game (http://www.comicsabelalves.com/p/game-of-thrones-8-bit-game.html)

[The_Mike]

I gave PostMortem a whirl and quite liked it. Pretty atmospheric setting with a nice and simple art style and lots of well-crafted flavour text. I decided to just kill the first person I saw to see what would happen. I am gratified to have read in an interview the game's creator was asked if he was worried about this and his response was essentially "but why wouldn't you let a player do that if they want?" Minor plot spoiler:

What happened was I screwed up the country for another two years.

From what I can gather, this was generally a bad thing, but I didn't feel hit over the head with the idea that I made a wrong choice or failed. It's just the cumulative consequences of this particular person dying on this particular night. Other people will have other consequences, and that's the way it is. I really like the concept, and I'd love to see this sequence as part of a larger and more complex game. Imagine something with the scope of a Final Fantasy Tactics but with the ability to drive the course of future events in different directions by a choice you have to make. I understand a lot of games have a morality system and give you the odd ethical dilemma or let you save one character at the expense of another, but this was something different. Here, your choice has an impact on the course of history, and it's a choice you aren't coerced or bribed into making. You're not picking the person to kill who offers the least tactically to your party. It's a very free choice that you can imbue with as much gravity or frivolity as you wish.

[turdpower]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7959-Papers-Please-and-Brothers-A-Tale-of-Two-Sons

Review of Papers Please

Sums it up well to be honest.

[The_Mike]

I mentioned Gunpoint earlier in this thread (and more recently in the Steam sale thread). I just finished the campaign and really enjoyed it. The gameplay is fun and fluid, and each level provides a bit of a brain teaser without relying on ridiculous obfuscation or ninja reflexes. The story is really good, too; you can play it as a tongue-in-cheek wacky caper or a more serious film noir type thing, and there are moral decisions to make that rely partly on self-interest vs. doing the right thing and partly on simply having to guess at who to trust. I hope a sequel is forthcoming, or further games in this mold.

[The_Mike]

When you finish the game you get to make your own blog post about how your playthrough went. It's a cute little feature. This is mine:

http://www.pentadact.com/category/conwaysblog/?K=5&U=36&C0=1&E1=1&C1=2&E2=1&C2=3&C3=3&C4=3&C5=3