In Packets, Please, you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP; your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities — you can boost Trump's tweets, disconnect political dissidents, and throttle rival video-on-demand services, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users.
It's based on 2013's Papers, Please, where you play an immigration officer in a grim, Soviet-style republic.
Matthew Gault's Motherboard review gives a good sense of the gameplay:
Like Papers, Please, Packets, Please tosses information so quickly at the player they barely have time to process it. The longer the game goes on, the more stress kept me from paying too much attention to what the ISP was doing it. Very quickly I went from denying people access to streaming sites, to cutting off anyone trying to connect from South America because of political problems on the continent. I was just trying to get along, keep my head down, and earn a living. I wasn’t thinking about what the internet meant to political activists in countries a world away. That’s the point.Packets, Please was made by a six-person team that created the game in 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2018. Every year, Global Game Jam gathers developers from across the world and gives them a theme, 2018’s was “transmission,” and sets them loose to design a game based on that theme. Packets, Please is one of those games.
Packets, Please [Cosmic Adventure Squad]
‘Packets, Please’ Is a Post-Net-Neutrality Simulator from Hell [Matthew Gault/Motherboard]
