Papers, Please
Worth it · Narrative · 2013
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $9.99, a BANGER if it drops to $7.49.
- Length
- 5h
- Value
- $2.00/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, OpenGL 1.4 or better, 102 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Congratulations. The October labor lottery is complete. Your name was pulled. For immediate placement, report to the Ministry of Admission at Grestin Border Checkpoint. An apartment will be provided for you and your family in East Grestin. Expect a Class-8 dwelling.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.99. That was January 2018. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 51 in the 13 years tracked, about 13 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 13 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $7.49 BANGER line 49 times.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 69 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Beholder ($1.39, scores 86) beats it on value, while it beats Beholder 2 ($2.69, scores 75).
The press gave it 85; the people who bought it give it 97 percent. A 12-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 27 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2023 to August 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 1,677 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 988 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 87 percent of the 7,237 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 5 hours; clearing it takes 16, which is 3.2 times the campaign.
At 5 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
58% start to 7% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
416 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
One of the best simplest games! At the end of the day you always have to work at the border, but this game makes it so much interesting. It transforms a repetitive, bureaucratic job into a gripping puzzle of logic, morality, and survival. Every document check feels like a high-stakes decision where your family's fate is on the line. A masterclass in minimalist design that stays with you long after the shift ends...
How does one evaluate a game that accomplishes everything it sets out to do even when those goals include being intentionally uncomfortable and tedious? By gamifying a dead-end job and adding difficulty via penalties, time pressure, awkward controls, and visual clutter, it invests you enough in success that the moral decisions that jeopardize that success have consequence. The bureaucracy isn't just the setting...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Papers, Please scores 79/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/239030/papers-pleaseThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.