Both this and Gone Home are on my list of games to catch up on. May be able to sneak these in on my vacation in late October. I think games like this are a great idea -- it seems the absolute opposite of GTA. It could be just the kind of thing that teaches people empathy.

Thanks for the review!

The best part of Papers, Please was when some guy made fun of you for having a "Certificate of Adequacy" hanging in your booth.

I'll admit I'm a little late to the game on The Oregon Trail —the MECC thriller about the realities of 19th century pioneer life. But it's a game set in the American west in 1848, and you provision a wagon, traverse land and rivers, and hunt for food. A BASIC game—who could resist?

It is, of course, much more than that. Your job is also to ration food, determine the pace of travel, bury dead family members and ignore, if you can, the fact that you could shoot everything in sight but only carry back a maximum of 200 pounds of meat. Your large family depends on you to keep them warm, safe, fed, free from river drownings and the telltale signs of dysentery. And that's just the beginning.

The Oregon Trail forces the player to make moral decisions and deal with them. It puts you inside the head of a person who must decide if FARTFACE’s diptheria merits slowing the pace of the party and raising the risks for everyone else. And even if you have enough fancy banker money to lavishly provision yourself, or even if you could find some way to escape with your entire family, someone is going to die along the way, someone is going to be betrayed, and it is heartbreaking and weird and so very, very real.

The Oregon Trail is a great illustration of the merits of videogames as a way to tell a story—it's the promise of the interactive medium paying off and telling a very real, emotional, and serious story. Whereas some very good videogames ultimately feel like a way to pass the time (I'm not going to say that I haven't been playing Animal Crossing nearly nonstop for weeks) and others feel like just very slow, Quicktime-Event-Based-Movies, The Oregon Trail is a game that tells a story in a way that really couldn't be done any other way. It's absolutely not the only game that does this—see Gone Home, the riot-grrrl-story-exploration-game, and may more from through the years (please leave angry comments below with your favorites)—but it's a great one. You could watch a slow, depressing Kelly Reichardt film about a sad wagon train experience, but you wouldn't be sitting there on the wagon, looking a poor woman in the face and deciding whether or not you should speed up the pace to make her die because you’re bored and have something funny to write on her grave.

In The Oregon Trail, your own skills, your own choices (“How many wagon tongues are too many? Are sets of clothes a complete waste of money? Could I subsidize the trip by transporting slaves?”), and your own mistakes shape the story. It's depressing as heck, but it's also an immensely satisfying experience.

I haven't finished Papers, Please yet -- it's so stressful by day 6 or so, that I end up making too many mistakes. Neat concept, though. I liked the older guy who keeps coming nearly every day with terribly forged documents.

Now you have Organ Trail http://hatsproductions.com/organtrail.html too