It's more of a tragic story than a game. The misery is kind of the point. If you don't see that point or can't enjoy that, then yeah, it'll be terrible.

Fwiw, it is absolutely possible to save your whole family in Papers Please. First time players aren't necessarily expected to manage it, though, so you're not wrong about losing family members being the intended experience. It's definitely a game that tries to be "engaging" rather than " fun". I enjoyed it a lot back in college, but who knows how I'd feel now that I have a full-time job.

The game is more of a short story. Which means the gameplay is intentionally grinding because the job is grinding. Which honestly IS bad gameplay, but delivers the message it's going for. If reading depressing alt history dystopia is not how you want to spend your time, then I don't blame you one little inch. ♥

For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.

I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.

While i agree that it's rather punishing, but to me it feels like that's how it works under a dictatorship. I like how i need to work toward some of the ending by breaking the law

Agreed. I thought I would enjoy it but ended up not liking the game play.

I want to take it slow and thoroughly examine the papers but apparently I can't because there is a time limit each day. Extremely stressful and unfun.

Papers, Please has 20 different endings, you can definitely follow a different storyline!

Glory to Artstozka

I only played that game briefly, and I was so confused with the game mechanics, maybe I didn't stick with it for so long, but I remember it wasn't very clear at the beginning how you should proceed?

Definitely sitting in my backlog though.