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The first time someone slips you a flyer for a strip club, it seems hilariously incongruous. Inevitably, you can't afford everything, and it's all too easy to be heading home to a dying wife and starving child, knowing you've not earned enough to save either of them. After each working day, you have to balance your domestic budget, dividing your pittance between heating and food for your family, while also allowing for medicine when they get sick, gifts for birthdays and the like. It's here that the game gets seriously bleak. You don't earn much and every deduction is a huge chunk out of your salary.

The first few slip-ups are allowed to pass without sanction, but after that you're fined five Arstotzkan dollars for every blunder.

Turn away a valid visitor or let in somebody with dodgy papers, and you're in trouble. Mistakes trigger a dot matrix communiqué from your superiors. It's up to you to check them over for any suspicious information or discrepancies and then stamp the passport: green lets them in, red sends them packing. They appear in your booth as a lumpy, pixellated sack of human desperation, and dutifully hand over their papers. Then you pull the lever that opens the grille, and use the tannoy to summon the first shuffling figure in a long snaking line of poor souls hoping to enter Arstotzka, either temporarily or permanently.

You start by reading the diktat handed down by your superior, detailing any changes or restrictions to the immigration laws. Assigned by a labour lottery to work for the Ministry of Admission, you spend your day stuck in a dank booth at a border checkpoint, responsible for deciding who gets to enter the country and who gets turned away - or worse. You don't play as anyone special, just a downtrodden citizen of the ominous Soviet-styled nation of Arstotzka in the dying months of 1982. What we have here is the literal opposite of the usual power fantasy. It's not a game you'll fire up for a 10-minute distraction, but it is a game you should play if you have any interest in how games can explore more than just bombastic wish fulfilment. It's a game that leaves a scar, forcing you to confront your own capacity for evil, without the comforting framing device of role-play and morality meters. It's compelling, challenging and genuinely unnerving. You couldn't really describe Papers, Please, a "dystopian document thriller" from indie developer Lucas Pope, as fun.

Is it interesting? Thought-provoking? Never mind all that: is it fun? Almost impossible to define, it's a lightweight term that lacks any real heft, yet it's come to be one of the most commonly used criteria for deciding if a game is any good.