[BaculumMeumEst]

for some reason i just couldn’t get into it. i love the aesthetic, but i hated the pacing; the game's frequent unskippable walking sequences and menu transitions between puzzle solving felt like a slog.

papers please is one of my favorite games of all time, though, and i enjoyed other first person puzzlers like the witness and portal.

[skeaker]

I had a similar experience. It's unfortunate since I hear it get praised constantly for being a masterpiece and I am a big fan of puzzle games, but it just would not click for me. I think it's also to do with the nature of the puzzle being kind of abstract (and at times almost subjective since I think multiple answers can potentially be correct for some causes of death). The game tries to handle this with the evidence book that you can refer to, but it's a massive thing that just feels clunky to use due to the sheer size of it.

[anyfoo]

Same here, and I also felt like I was missing out, since people were raving about it so much. But to me it really did feel like I had to slowly work on making any progress, and I mean "work" in its most tedious meaning.

Though, I wonder whether, had I played past a certain point where my evidence book would have had enough "critical mass" for things to fall into place more readily, it would have been more fun. Not sure it solves the pacing issue, though.

I should probably get back to it and find out.

[yayachiken]

I loved the game, but I can see where people struggle. You cannot laser-focus on the objective. Just get in character, you are on a mysterious ship, it's completely abandoned and somehow returned to harbor still. You are just trying to get a clue what the heck is even going on here, why would you care about filling in a puzzle book?

Just enjoy the first part cinematically. Explore the ship and unlock the scenes. Absorb the atmosphere from the scenes, and enjoy the music. Try to figure out the disjointed narrative, and don't focus on your puzzle book. (One of the flaws is that the forced waiting sequence should IMO lock you out of accessing the puzzle book completely. I often forgot, and got annoyed because I could not enter the cause of death before the page got unlocked after the scene...) You will not be able to solve a lot in the first pass anyways. The game throws you some freebies, yes, but that's just to let you get used to handling the book.

For context, once I had unlocked all scenes, I had not even one quarter of the book solved, and despite what I recommend in the first paragraphs, it was not for lack of trying. This is when you notice that you have everything you need, and a sort of panic sets in. You realize that it will not get easier than this. This intrigued me a lot, and this was when the real puzzle game starts. Now you revisit all the scenes analyzing every nook and cranny of the dioramas like some nautical Sherlock Holmes. But it's never stupid "hunt the pixel" like one would assume from that description, no. I have never seen the attention for detail in any game before, and the dev really thought of everything.

If you ever find yourself thinking "Oh wow, I can deduce something here from the position of that piece of scenery, but there is no way this was intended", then the answer is always "Oh yes, it totally was". Then you enter the suspicion into the book, and suddenly the game validates you by copying your notes into print with that cheerful music jingle. After a while the screen turning black and the first notes starting will give you a dopamine rush already.

The game captures perfectly what for example escape rooms or detective stories are about. The only real downside of the game is that the replay value is 0 by its very concept. I envy you for still being able to play it blind.

[anyfoo]

That convinced me to try it out again, with a slightly different mindset, thanks.

[BaculumMeumEst]

ah, i didn't think to try playing the game like that. i'll give it a go.

[frabcus]

I recommend playing it with friends!

[dgant]

It will accept multiple verbs for some appropriate cases. I recall any time I thought I had problems with verbs I actually had something else wrong.

[adamrezich]

I played the demo at release (as I'd liked Papers, Please), and it completely failed to grab me—aside from the art style, which seemed to me to be "wasted" on such a dumb gameplay concept.

then I picked it up years later, earlier this year, and was absolutely hooked. I practically couldn't put it down until I finished. one of my top games of all time. a perfect example of how video games, as a medium, can tell stories in ways that other media never could—an excellent counterexample to cutscenes and dialogue trees being the accepted industry standard for storytelling.

[TylerE]

I can't even do this aesthetic. Instant massive eye strain.

[smcl]

I'm a little bit the same. The look and feel is wonderful, the idea is great and novel. I just couldn't get that far into it. I think I may have also gotten distracted by the release Elden Ring around the time I started playing it, too.