The job market is in shambles right now. Whether you're currently searching for employment or haven't dusted off your CV for a few years, it's hard to ignore the fact that it can be incredibly difficult to land a job thanks to the rise of AI, mass layoffs, and more and more people searching than ever. This is especially true in the games industry, and developer IceLemonTea Studio has decided to showcase a dystopian future of what the job market may look like in its Papers, Please-like Thank You For Your Application.
After being hired as a temporary, junior interviewer, we're given the task of sifting through candidates applying for jobs at a big, faceless corporation. We sift through CVs, graduation certificates, proof of employment, psychological evaluations, and more, searching for any discrepancies which will lead to a candidate being denied. Like Papers, Please, you will get approached by people pleading to let them through to the next stage, even if they've not got all the requirements met to pass. Have a heart, and you'll have your pay docked. With bills to pay and a family to look after, you can't always make the right choice for everyone else and the right choice for you.
The gameplay in Thank You For Your Application is very satisfying, and will have you turning into a full-on evil HR rep as you throw someone's dreams aside for a misspelled company name on their proof of employment. There's a bit of information overload at times, as new criteria comes in through the bulletin with each passing day, but once you get into the flow of a working day, you'll quickly become more machine than man as you immediately ignore a candidate's quick hello and pleading smile to sift through all their documents as fast as possible, then either chuck them onto the next stage or send them into the land of disappointment.
There's a bit of a brighter vibe to Thank You For Your Application compared to Papers, Please. It's not exactly life and death, as even if you do decline someone, they can come back to you at a later date having found success in life. The dystopia is different, as IceLemonTea has cleverly crafted a world which seems to be doing fine on paper, thanks to the major corporations that ensure no one is really aware how much the desperate search for jobs is leading people to depression, manic behaviour, and that big businesses are crushing towns, cities, and even countries under the weight of their greed. It's all smiles, until the cracks start to show.
Thank You For Your Application has a lot of unique personality and flair. The designs are vibrant and pixelated as are the characters, so you don't mind meeting the same fresh-faced graduate for the third time in a day. Some of the dialogue for the basic rejections can become a tad repetitive, but because the gameplay of spotting the difference is so engaging, you barely notice what's being said in a conversation until the Q&A feature rolls around. That is partly detrimental to the game, as it meant I was rarely focused on anything but the information in front of me when playing, so some story elements were lost along the way. Most of the story you pick up via emails back at your in-game apartment, or through conversations on your commute home. Even if you pay as much attention as possible, though, it can still be easy to get lost along the way, and end up with a nasty surprise.
Thank You For Your Application has multiple endings, some of which can sneak up on you if you're not careful. Work too much overtime and you'll die from exhaustion, for example. Or, buy something from the "black market" in-game store, and one day you'll be told that your purchasing history will be shared with your company, and at the end of the day you end up fired. What 's frustrating about these endings is that while some of them can be remedied pretty easily by reloading a past save, some require you to basically change the course of your old playthrough or start a new one. As a run of Thank You For Your Application takes around 5 hours, there's not too much wrong with the game wanting you to have multiple runs. However, that replayability contrasts with the core loop. The candidates you get aren't random, as far as I could tell, and so if you remember who to pass and let go, the experience loses a lot of its zing.
As the story develops, you'll find it trickier to maintain your usual working patterns. Work-life balance is basically a thing of the past, but you've also got your little sister and mum to look after, as well as a small revolution you may want to take part in. There's plenty of options, plenty of endings, but it can be hard to keep track of what's going on at times, largely due to the fact everyone's name is a letter followed by two numbers. When a guy called K88 wants to speak to me on the train home, it would have been nice if his image had popped up when he's speaking to me, as I could not remember for the life of me what he looked like. The naming of the characters helps with the theming of the world, reducing everyone's individual identity to three symbols, but it also then makes it hard to latch onto any character as an individual. The naming of some of the organisations in the game suffer from a similar lack of identity, and when someone approaches me calling me their comrade, I therefore can't remember if I should be rooting for or trying to stop these guys. It all gets a bit vague after the halfway point, with your character's story feeling like it takes a backseat to wider world events, that you won't even get to see if you make a silly mistake midway through a run.
Endings aside, though, I was intrigued by the world and the story of Thank You For Your Application throughout. I only wanted a bit more clarity to I could further immerse myself in the game's well-crafted dystopia. The gameplay is immensely fun, and gives you that evil satisfaction with each denied resume, until your heartstrings are pulled by someone telling you they need this job or they'll be a disappointment to everyone they've ever known. It's a Papers, Please like with a lot of its own unique charm, and a game that feels well worth the few hours you'll likely put in.
