Venba and Papers, Please (which came out 10 years ago this month) might seem very different, but the two games share a common cause.
has been out for 10 years now and it still bubbles up in my mind all the time. It’s been touted as a dystopian document thriller, but I’ve always remembered it as an empathy game where you’re made to inhabit a stranger’s point of view through words and rigorous play. It exists at a completely different level of magnification and uses different means, but the new narrative cooking gameBoth use a combination of well-written dialogue and simulated mundane tasks to tell their story.
One person near the end of the first day answers your request for his documents by curtly telling you “It was a mistake to open this checkpoint,” before leaving. This only comes after another traveler complains about waiting in line for eight hours. The first guy doesn’t mention that he waited in that same line all day to give you his ominous message, which makes it that much more haunting and effective when you complete that circuit in your head.
But the gameplay loop is where each game drills down and makes you feel something. They pull different levers and knobs, but both games forcefully put you into the headspace of their main character. You feel what it’s like to comfort and cook for a husband fighting a Sisyphean climb in a xenophobic job market where he’s the wrong skin tone. Or to spend your days staring at strangers with various levels of contempt in their eyes as you provide for a family you never see.
Both games bring back vivid memories of my late Jidu. There’s the well-worn tale of leaving his life and family behind in Baghdad to come to California as a young man in the late ‘50s , or the time spent together in the kitchen where I was lucky enough to learn his favorite Iraqi dishes from the man himself.also lovingly renders the interiority of a first generation child who feels like they don’t live up to or inhabit their ethnicity in the “right” way.
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