Antichamber is all about thinking outside of the box, but the box is common sense.

Like exiting a room through a door and expecting it to still be there after immediately turning around, only to find a long-ass corridor that just materialised out of nowhere. Or following a passage that makes six right 90º turns one after the other without the path never crossing itself. Or throwing yourself down a whole into the same exact room with the same exact whole you just left.

Yeah, if you've heard of "forget everything you learned in college" get ready for "forget everything you learned in preschool". You know, small things like object permanence or basic human reasoning regarding three-dimensional spaces. We don't do any of that here.

Jokes aside, Antichamber is one of the most fun and original puzzle games that currently exists, and the reason for that is because it is, fundamentally, an enigmatic trickster. It is constantly pulling your leg, making you stumble through your false assumptions on how the game works. It is once you abandon what seems "obvious" and instead try to explore and reach further, to understand the rules and therefore the true possibilities and limitations of the game, that you're able to see the poetic secret behind every puzzle's solution.

Antichamber plays by its own rules. It's a magician that always has a new trick up his sleeve, looking at your confident glare and pulling a fat smirk as you're walking right into his trap. You already fell for the trick, you just don't know it yet. But every trick has a secret, and finding it is about stop looking at where the magician wants you to look, and search elsewhere.

Antichamber is a masterpiece. One of the best puzzle games ever made, and if you're remotely interested in the genre you'll do yourself a favor by letting it show you the incredibly ingenious, yet complicated riddles it has to offer.

You process passports, that’s pretty much it.

It’s impressive how such a simple and seemingly boring premise as passport checking can be executed so well to the point it can get addictively entertaining. In Papers, Please you’re a border guard in the dystopian communist country of Arstotzka, who has to deal with people wanting to through the border.

The passport task is entertaining by itself, as a difficulty curve has been smoothly created by introducing new legislations and regulations related to the political events within the game world, which you must follow as days go by increasing the amount of paperwork and therefore the challenge.

About the game’s narrative, the small conversations and interactions with the people that want to pass the border, each with their own reasons and background, is the cherry on the top. Papers, Please really puts you in the skin of another government pawn, and presents hard situations related to moral and ethics, as the people you encounter may be assassinated if you don’t let them through, you might separate families because one of their passports has expired, or you have to let in obvious criminals who have all the correct paperwork, impotent being able to do nothing about it, because you have limited mistakes, limited time, and a family to feed with the money made as people is processed. Though the family mechanic is not as sentimental, just numbers on a screen that force you to make as much money as possible, not creating a bond of any kind between you and them.

Also, apart from the punctual encounters, there’s a main storyline related to the country’s future which you can take part off by deciding who gets in and who doesn’t.

Overall, Papers, Please is a really well crafted game that offers hours upon hours of entertainment if you like it’s gameplay style and wish to explore the different narrative routes it offers by making different decisions through the game. I highly recommend it to anyone interested but be advised that when I say it’s office-like gameplay I mean it, the base gameplay is process paperwork with small events in the middle that make the difference, if that style does not click for you, you will probably not enjoy the game at its core.

Overall Score: 9/10