0.6 hours played
Written 1 year and 7 months ago
Since Papers Please became an indie hit, lots of similar games have tried to recreate its formula with varying success. Although Eggnog Incorporated doesn't have many reviews, it has a pretty high positive rating so far - so I was surprised by how much I disliked it.
Papers Please managed to turn boring busywork into a tense, exciting gaming experience. This is because the stakes were high - you needed to pay attention and be quick to ensure you earned enough money to get medicine for your son. You wanted to work hard and get promoted to provide a better life for your family. You were confronted with moral dilemmas that could heavily impact somebody else's life or even the future of your entire country.
Eggnog Incorporated has very little stakes. You live in a crappy apartment, so I guess the implication is that you want to get a nicer one. It's not remotely close to giving enough meaning to the boring, repetitive gameplay of reviewing hundreds of cartons of eggnog before they go out for sale.
Every night at the end of your shift your boss asks you to approve a clearly wrong carton of eggnog. He usually doesn't explain why he wants you to do that. If you obey him he likes you, if you don't he acts like a stroppy teenager and punishes you. This is the game's silly and ineffective way of copying the moral dilemmas in Papers Please.
Additionally, the gameplay in Eggnog Inc feels way more annoying than in Papers Please. In the latter you spend most of the time looking around at different places on the screen, reviewing and evaluating in your head before you make a decision and start clicking some buttons. In this game however, everything is very manual and requires lots of clicks. Just to create an 'approved' or 'denied' sticker to put on a carton you have to press a button down, turn a key and complete a little puzzle. For every single carton of eggnog. Honestly one of the reasons I only spent 30 minutes in this game is because my hand genuinely started to cramp up.
Also, when a new mechanic is added to your job in Papers Please, you usually understand why. There was a security breach, so you have to be stricter the next day. A certain type of fraud is becoming an issue so you are given a new way of combating it. In Eggnog Inc the game literally jokes about how pointless its new mechanics are. They added a new puzzle to my sticker-producing machine and the boss just said, "I'm not even sure what that does!"
You are also only told about your mistakes at the end of the day. So if you are wrong about a carton you might not be told until 5~ minutes later at which point you won't remember that carton at all. It takes away the stressful feeling of anticipation when you make your final decision, and makes it harder to learn.
Not to mention, obviously, that the art is much less attractive here. Apparently I felt so passionately about disliking this game that I spent more time reviewing it than playing it!