Exit Strategy

Papers, Please, from the other side of the desk: you're the forger, and the border is closing.

The petrostate is collapsing and the regime is sealing its borders. You're the forger everyone whispers about, the one who can still get a name onto a clean exit visa. For the right cut.

• Forge it by hand. Type the fields, draw the signature, press the photo, roll the stamp. Copy every detail off the client's real papers, because one wrong digit is what gets them stopped at the wire.
• Three clocks, all against you. The borders seal in a handful of days. Each desperate client's own window is closing. And the working day is only so long before curfew cuts it short.
• Name your cut. Haggle the fee. Ask too much and they walk out the door, ask too little and the risk isn't worth it.
• Live with what you forged. Papers you submit are judged at the border by day's end. The morning bulletin names who slipped through and who got caught, and a caught forgery brings an official to your door. Bribe them, or deny it and pray they've got no proof.
• Every seal has an owner. The officials whose signatures you copy get purged when your work is intercepted, so the hand you've spent all week learning to forge keeps changing under you.

Make it to the day the borders seal, and you got out too.

How to Play

New to the desk? It plays with the mouse alone. Here is the order of a single job.

1. Pick a client

Click a name in the WAITING queue on the left to sit them down. The dollar marks show how large the payout is, and a red timer means that client cannot wait long.

2. Agree on your fee

Haggle when the client makes their offer. Settle on a cut you can both live with, and their blank document opens on the desk.

3. Stamp, sign, and add the photo

Drag the portrait into the photo box, press the stamp where it belongs, and trace the faint guide on the signature pad in one pass. Keep every mark clean, because a paper smothered in seals or a signature run over twice reads as fake.

4. Fill every field

Drag the information chips from the left onto the matching blank on the paper. Some values sit on the client's own ID card. The rest come from your informant inside the Directorate of Exit Control, printed on the INFORMANT note laid beside the papers. A few chips are decoys that look right but are wrong, so check each value against the papers before you drag it.

5. Submit the papers

Check the Forgery Quality bar at the bottom of the document. It climbs as your work gets closer to the real thing. Get it as high as you can, then press Submit and call the next client.

• Ahmed Ali (Dev & Art)
• Istikan Studio
• Music by Florin Cinca from Pixabay
• Sound Effect by Alex from Pixabay
• Sound Effect by freesound_community from Pixabay