I received this game through Curator Connect.
And I'm not going to review it.
I read the description on the Steam page and the reviews from people who had already played it, and I never even clicked the Install Game button.
So let's make one thing absolutely clear from the beginning.
This is not a review of Paper Pusher.
It can't be.
I haven't played it.
This is simply an explanation of why I decided not to.
The premise is straightforward enough.
You work for Extricate Inc., described on the Steam page as a non-consensual euthanasia service connected to the US government.
Every day, you're given information about several people.
Their age.
Gender.
Job.
Income.
Physical abnormalities.
Drug use.
And so on.
Then you decide who gets to live and who gets to die.
That's already political territory.
Which is fine.
People are political.
Once you're old enough to vote and participate directly in society, it's perfectly normal to develop political opinions of your own.
One person likes politician A and dislikes politician B.
Another dislikes A and likes B.
Someone else dislikes both of them and prefers C.
That's how people work.
What you cannot do is assume that because you dislike A, everyone else must dislike A too.
The moment you start behaving as though your political judgement is simply the obvious judgement of every sensible person in the world, you've crossed from having an opinion into being arrogant.
And satire needs to be especially careful about that.
Satire can be magnificent.
It can also be absolutely insufferable.
Done well, it can be some of the funniest art imaginable.
Done badly, it can feel less like comedy or criticism and more like someone congratulating themselves for being socially aware.
Look at me.
I understand society.
I recognise injustice.
I'm making you think about important things.
A serious subject does not automatically make a serious work of art.
A social issue does not automatically make satire intelligent.
And asking an uncomfortable question does not automatically make the person asking it profound.
Roald Dahl, the author of Revolting Rhymes, once explained black comedy with a wonderfully horrible example.
If a bucket of paint falls on a man's head, it's funny.
If it fractures his skull and kills him, it's tragic.
But if a man falls into a sausage machine and ends up being sold in shops by the pound, somehow it becomes funny again.
And tragic.
His point was that somewhere within that strange territory lies the secret of black comedy.
I think that's important.
Black comedy works because the comedy works.
Not because someone has selected a sufficiently unpleasant subject and announced that they're satirising it.
Just look at Grand Theft Auto.
Rockstar has deep British roots, although it is now an American company based in New York.
Grand Theft Auto has nevertheless spent decades gleefully tearing into American culture.
Its fictional America exaggerates consumerism, celebrity, crime, politics, advertising and just about everything else it can get its hands on.
And it's funny.
Frequently, spectacularly funny.
Fallout approaches America from somewhere else entirely.
Its alternate, retro-futuristic United States turns American exceptionalism, consumer culture, militarism and Atomic Age optimism into something grotesque enough to be funny and horrifying at the same time.
Bethesda's Fallout games continued building on that fictional America.
But there is another reason those games work for me.
Satire isn't the main event.
Grand Theft Auto is a game first.
It gives you characters, stories, missions, driving, shooting and an enormous playground in which to cause trouble.
Fallout is an RPG first.
It gives you a world to explore, people to meet, choices to make and stories to discover.
The satire grows out of those worlds.
It isn't the entire reason those worlds exist.
You could miss half the jokes in Grand Theft Auto and still have a game.
You could ignore half the social commentary in Fallout and still have an RPG.
That's important to me.
The satire is seasoning.
It isn't the meal.
So no, I don't think only Americans are allowed to satirise America.
That would be ridiculous.
But there is still something slightly different about making fun of your own family and hearing a stranger make fun of them.
I can call my sibling an idiot.
If some bloke I've never met walks over and starts calling my sibling an idiot, I may suddenly feel rather less amused.
Countries obviously aren't families.
But I think there is something emotionally similar at work.
Americans themselves make merciless jokes about America all the time.
Sometimes the most vicious jokes about a country come from the people who live there.
Outsiders can join in too.
Rockstar certainly did.
But if you're going to criticise someone else's society, I'd rather the result actually be funny, sharp or insightful enough to justify the intrusion.
What I don't enjoy is the feeling of someone standing outside another society and saying:
Look how enlightened I am for identifying everything wrong with these people.
And as a reviewer, I have the opposite problem.
I'm not American.
I like America, but I don't live there.
So who am I to receive a game explicitly invoking the US government and then start delivering some grand judgement on American social problems?
The Steam page doesn't say "a government".
It doesn't invent some nameless country.
It specifically describes Extricate Inc. in relation to the US government.
Perhaps the America in Paper Pusher is entirely fictional.
It probably is, at least to some degree.
But if that's important, I think establishing that clearly is part of the developer's job.
Grand Theft Auto gives me its America.
Fallout gives me its America.
They construct worlds in which their satire has context.
Simply writing US government carries baggage of its own.
And I don't particularly want to appoint myself an expert on that baggage.
Then there is the part that bothers me even more.
The social experiment.
The Steam page actually says:
"This game learns who you are and what you care about in a person as you play."
That may have been the sentence that killed my remaining interest.
Because the player reviews suggest that this is indeed one of the central attractions.
People talk about learning things about themselves through the choices the game asks them to make.
Apparently a lot of people enjoyed that.
Good.
I'm not one of them.
I simply don't like the idea of a game presenting me with carefully constructed fictional human beings, making me decide which ones deserve to live, and then analysing those decisions to tell me something about myself.
Not because I'm afraid of what it might say.
I just dislike the exercise.
I have political values.
I have moral values.
I have opinions about society.
Of course I do.
I'm an adult.
I don't need every piece of entertainment I consume to avoid politics, and I certainly don't expect artists to avoid difficult subjects.
But I also don't particularly enjoy being placed inside somebody else's little social experiment and then being told that my answers reveal something profound about who I am.
Perhaps Paper Pusher handles that idea brilliantly.
Perhaps it handles it with enormous subtlety.
Perhaps my impression of the whole thing as rather self-conscious social commentary would disappear completely if I actually played it.
I don't know.
And that's important.
Because I haven't played it.
I'm not going to accuse a developer of making shallow political satire based on a Steam description and some user reviews.
That would be ridiculous.
The game never got the opportunity to prove my first impression wrong because I chose not to give it that opportunity.
That's my decision, not a verdict on the quality of the game.
There is one final problem.
I'm not even convinced this is the sort of horror game I should be covering.
I have no problem with psychological horror that contains no monsters, gore or jump scares.
Horror can come from almost anywhere.
But discomfort isn't automatically horror.
Regret isn't automatically horror.
A moral dilemma isn't automatically horror.
A dystopian premise isn't automatically horror.
Even the people who actually played Paper Pusher don't seem entirely united on that question.
One player describes expecting jump scares but instead finding psychological horror in the anguish and regret created by their choices.
Another simply says:
"I don't consider this horror at all."
Maybe I'd play it and decide the first person is right.
Maybe I'd play it and discover that this is one of the cleverest psychological horror games I've encountered.
But I won't know.
Because I still haven't clicked Install Game.
Which leaves me with one slightly awkward question.
Why was this sent to me through Curator Connect in the first place?
Perhaps the psychological-horror tag was enough.
Fair enough.
As for me?
I'm going to review a horror game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3789560/Paper_Pusher/?curator_clanid=46578905