Bystander Reviews

eee

its.......its stinky

I accidentally bought this in 2017 cause I thought that it was "Papers Please" game. I was too young to know for refund. FML

Challenging and fun. Some glitches here and there but that may be my graphics card. Still testing. I really like this game!

When 'Papers, Please' goes online. The game is similar. You make a judgement on the item based on the state regulation and/or some task given to you. The game is really in early stage but foundation of game mechanic is already laid and can be expanded for more challenge. The US$5 & under price tag is fair enough for this early game. I already have the gameplay videos uploaded, you guys make a choice to buy or not. I wish I could choose 'neither' recommend this game, the game is not bad or good for me given its current version. Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dyX3SxPgukmvyL31uQNpfXtaeVXNV3R EDIT1: Decided to change this to "not recommended" due to uncertain future development of this game.

DONT GET THIS. When you mark something as expired, the game doesnt work. Overall, this game feels kinda fun, but some elements feel bootleg and bad. For 7 more dollars, get an actual game, Papers, Please.

*Sigh* This game was just tiring. I wouldn't come to say it was a complete rip off of Paper's Please, but it was a very similar game but just worse. Mainly to the point that I played, at most, 10 minutes, I saw multiple repeats of the same messages, and the only updates were legislation, unlike in Papers, Please where you got new rules and new tools almost every day. I won't completely judge the game since I haven't played it the entire way through, but it's just not very good. Plain and simple.

When I first bought this game months ago when it was still in early access, I was expecting an interesting game about government censorship in the same style as Paper's Please. Overall the gameplay is similar, but the game is clearly filled with bugs, even months after it exited early access. There are multiple messages that should be marked as "Guity" because they violate the set rules you're given at the time, but the game will still penalize you because it doesn't fit the exact definition of whatever rule that is supposed to apply to it, then other's should be marked as "Clear", but the game, again, will penalize you for not knowing the exact definition of the rule that should apply to it. There's one message that straight up said "F**k this government!" in it and I marked it as guilty because it clearly violated the game's rule of "Negative expression towards the government or authority", but the game penalized me anyway for reasons of something like "The message fell under the topic of 'revolution' not anti-government". The game is straight up broken and doesn't follow its own rules! The game also doesn't have that much variety with the messages you have to judge, I've seen constant repeats of messages that I've seen in just the first 3 levels. Some of the messages aren't even in the right language you have set, so you can't even tell what they say to judge them properly! It honestly saddens me that the game is such a wasted effort, this could have been a really cool game about internet censorship or something, especially since Net Neutrality is such a hot topic right now. But it seems the developers just made a cookie cutter basic dystopian type game that mimics Paper's Please (A much better game worth your money), that doesn't even work as it should, and thus is extremely not fun to play! If you want a better game that touches on government censorship of the internet, with an interesting story to boot, I recommend getting Orwell over this! That game has much more interesting mechanics and takes better advantage of what it's trying to do than Bystander does.

It's said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However this may look like 'Papers Please', it's not as well designed. As a matter of fact it is a far cry from the type of game that this one tries to emulate.