There are aliens in Area 51. At least, there are in Security 51, the latest bureaucracy simulator to model itself on Lucas Pope’s hit, Papers, Please. Amid global chaos as pandemics sweep across the planet, your job is simply to let the right people in and out of America’s most secretive military base.
If you’ve played Papers, Please, Security 51 puts a fun spin on the passport-stamping concept. It’s a more lighthearted affair than Pope’s political thriller, which is impressive seeing as it deals with drastic measures of state violence, human testing, and terrible disease. In that it is fundamentally a Papers-like, the former game is required reading, but once you’ve finished with that you can pop by the Nevada desert for a fun, if flawed, iteration on the well-worn formula.
Security 51 will get a lot of comparisons to Papers, Please in this review and countless others because it wears its inspiration on its well-pressed sleeve. The primary gameplay mechanics are identical. You check whether ID cards have the correct numbers and names, and match the face to the individual trying to access the subterranean levels of the military base. It’s all very simple. Boring, even. But that’s the point.
Games like Not Tonight, No Umbrellas Allowed, Organs Please, Death and Taxes, and countless others succeed based on how they differ from Papers, Please and, even more importantly, how they eschew your expectations based on the similar games you’ve played before. In its attempt to do the same, Security 51 hits you with some good, old-fashioned comedy.
You’re slowly given various pieces of equipment and increasingly complex instructions in order to judge who may come and who gets turned away at the door like a teenager trying to get into an extraterrestrial nightclub with a fake ID and a rash that risks wiping out humanity. There are two varieties of X-ray machine (one to see skeletons and the other for checking organs for abnormalities) and a thermometer, a camera that will glitch out with visions of a phantom dog for some folk, and more. These are all presented in fun ways, with robot brains and rash-ridden six-packs (everyone, and I mean everyone has a six-pack) presented in glorious pixel art detail. None are particularly complex, as the game’s difficulty comes from the long lists of instructions you’re given each day.
Despite the apocalyptic stakes, Security 51 never takes itself seriously. On the one hand, you may as well be a sentient computer program sentencing people to death (or worse) due to the arbitrary rules that you follow. On the other, you can experiment on your human lab rats (that’s the worse) by subjecting them to torture via disco bangers.
This is another area that Security 51 departs from the established Papers-like formula: you also need to save the world.
In addition to your daily duties, it’s your job to research plague antidotes and test your human subjects to figure out how to stop alien viruses from spreading. Why they task a basic security grunt with all this, I don’t know, but your entire wage still gets eaten by the numerous $35 sandwiches you need to survive despite your role as apparent President of the World.
These various tests hint at a wider world and bigger stakes, but do little to actually add to the friction inherent with bureaucracy simulators. Mostly, they exist to drain another meter, a brain which represents both your mental health and your capacity to think. But the stress of these games rarely comes from keeping those meters topped up.
Think back to Papers, Please: your decisions made instant impacts on real people. Terrorists detonated bombs. Mothers were separated from their children. You felt terrible about every person you turned away from refuge. Well, most of them. Security 51 does little to personalise any of the folks you come across, and therefore the impacts of your decisions feel irrelevant. Oops, I sentenced a healthy man to death because I thought he may have been carrying a deadly virus. Oh well, his only dialogue was stock text repeated by four others the same day.
The police state is happy to use lethal force on your whim, but there is no moral punishment. Sure, you feel a bit guilty when a ticket tells you that was an innocent man, but that storytelling is completely removed from any gameplay repercussions bar a small fine.
Papers, Please also tasked you with getting through as many people as you could in a day in order to get paid more. This introduces a moral dilemma: do you carefully assess the individuals passing through, or do you glance at documents and make snap decisions so you can afford more food tonight? Security 51 instead gives you a set number of people to process each day, and ample time to get through them. Once I realised that I was breezing through my list with half my shift remaining, I slowed down and rarely made mistakes. I got a slightly smaller bonus because of my slower speed, but it was nothing compared to the fines for making a mistake.
Security 51’s satire is subtle. I’m not convinced that the $35 sandwich was an intentional dig at rising food costs or just priced to balance the gameplay, but it’s an effective nod to issues people are currently facing. Humorous headlines in your daily paper offer one-liners rather than cutting takes. This is a game that wants to make you smile rather than cringe. To that end, it’s moderately successful.
But this misses the point about what made Papers, Please so great. There’s no pressure in your daily routine because both surviving and processing are too easy. Managing your health and global catastrophe is remarkably simple. There are no stakes because errors result in a minor docking of pay and an uncharacterised NPC being carted off by security. The NPCs you interact with are devoid of life or personality. Security 51 removes any stress from the bureaucratic formula, replacing it with humour. Unfortunately, that makes for an underwhelming experience.
Security 51 is mechanically fun. Its gizmos and doowhats are varied and regularly elicit a chuckle. It looks great and will surprise with each passing day. But it fundamentally, perhaps wilfully, misunderstands the core premise of Papers, Please, and what’s left is a shallow facsimile that fails to replicate the excruciating decisions that characterise the genre.
