CAUTION: SPOILERS BELOW
Summary:
A Papers, Please clone, where you have to assess if each agent is a spy or not by validating their documents. If they aren't you must restrain them correctly before moving on.
My Experience:
Let me start with 2 admissions here: 1) I'm not a fan of Papers, Please at all, and didn't enjoy playing it, and 2) I found the instructions below the game nearly overwhelming at first. I'm writing that down because when I say that this is my absolute favourite game of this game jam and I've already played it for hours, I want it to be clear how unlikely I thought that was to happen. The art is fantastic, consistent, playful and functional; the game encourages you to observe the agents carefully so it had to be great, and it really is. The expressions and variety of restraints - I think 10 in total - are all fantastic. There are so many small, subtle details that can give away a spy that I still don't always catch them, the challenge of which makes it more rewarding to get the S rank at the end. There are many games I would like to see continued at the end of this submission period, but it would feel almost criminal to let this one go to waste. With the raving out of the way, let me just quickly note the bits I wish to see improved, because it's a short list: entering agent callsigns by hand is a bit annoying; not being able to cross reference the documents with the screen leads to a lot of flicking back and forth; restraint limits feel arbitrary and not super impactful (other than to stop overkill everyone, maybe?) and the animations to bind someone are way too long after a while. Of those, honestly, only the last one about animation is anything I would care about in the long run. So yes - I very much loved this
Theme Fit:
Not only does the theme fit very well, it's now the only way I can imagine a non-violent (or, I guess, less violent) version of Papers, Please. It's fun to be able to tie up anyone on demand, even if it's wrong, and it meshes with the task perfectly. As close to perfect as I've seen in a bondage game, let alone one made for a jam.
What Could Be Improved:
- A tutorial: The game is a flood of information at the start. In a fuller version, it would be good to be eased in instead.
- Speed up/skip animations: I can understand the design idea of wanting to see someone tied up slowly and have the option to go "oops, I didn't press the button in time" and overdo it; however, sometimes you just want to get to the 3rd stage and it takes quite a while for each step to tick up, and it would be very hard to do it accidentally.
- More impactful resources: Again, I can see the design that wanting people to tie "just enough" means putting limits in place. The resource seems to be random though, and I can't help but wonder if it matters at all. But then my head races to the idea of it being something you manage over the course of a campaign, and all those ideas lead to...
- More content: Not feedback for the game jam, more of a plea to keep this game going. I would happily pay for a fleshed out version of this game, and I really want to see more of it in the future!