Title: Security 51
Developer: Alawar
Publisher: Alawar
Release Date: August 12, 2026
Platforms: PC
Reviewed on: PC
Price: $9.99 (USD)

Welcome to your new job at Area 51. Make sure all visitors have their passport, their ID, and exactly one head. Unless it’s Two-Headed Tuesday, that is…

Synopsis

Security 51 has you playing as a new security guard working at the front desk of Area 51, a mysterious facility that researches and resolves paranormal incidents. Your job is to make sure that only approved people enter the facility. Anyone who doesn’t meet the ever-changing criteria handed down from upper management must be either turned away or otherwise eliminated.

As the game progresses, your list of criteria grows longer, stranger, and more convoluted. Your arsenal of verification tools gradually expands, and you must take on new responsibilities like isolation research and city operation management, all while spending your hard-earned wages on food, station upgrades, and the occasional diversion to maintain your sanity.

Presentation

In case it wasn’t apparent from the screenshots and synopsis, Security 51 is heavily inspired by Papers, Please. The gameplay loop is virtually identical. You start each day with a newspaper on your desk and a new list of entry criteria. Characters will occasionally chat with you or ask you to go against the rules. You end each shift with a bit of resource management to keep yourself fed and sane. You even announce your decisions the same way, stamping entry tickets with a big tool on your desk.

It’s a serviceable imitation, but it lacks the story and themes that made the original game so compelling. Every element of Papers, Please is tied in with the themes of authoritarianism, survival, and small acts of rebellion. Security 51 takes all of these elements wholesale and plops them into a completely different context. It shatters the carefully-built themes and replaces them with… not much.

I suppose there’s a sort of underlying humor to the “another day at the office” attitude that the player character brings to their incredibly bizarre workplace. But there are a lot of extraneous elements that don’t work in the new context. The ominous political headlines of The Truth of Arstozka are replaced with non-sequitur joke headlines. The risky choice of aiding the rebellion is replaced with a completely inconsequential choice to help a scientist and/or a general. It all smacks of copying someone’s homework without understanding the answers you wrote down.

All that being said, Security 51 still has parts that shine. Each day starts with a short animation of the player character finding ways to pass the time at his desk – playing pencil drums, building a house of cards, that sort of thing. These do a lot of work to help characterize him as a sort of hapless everyman just trying to get through the work day. The game also features dozens, if not hundreds, of different anomalies that could potentially appear. Every anomaly is both visually distinct and fairly unsettling, which is no easy feat to achieve.

Gameplay

If you’ve played Papers, Please, you’ll feel right at home behind the desk in Security 51. People come to your guard station one at a time requesting entry into the facility, and it’s your job to decide whether to let them in, turn them away, or have them shot by security.

Every day you are presented with a new list of criteria to check, which starts off simple enough – a name discrepancy in their paperwork or a strange rash on their skin – but as the game progresses, the criteria start building, overlapping, and sometimes even contradicting each other. You might have to call security if they have eyes growing on their organs, but if they also have specific micro-organisms in their blood, then they’re OK to go through.

I really appreciate the variety on display in this part of the game. There are so many different anomalies in the game’s library that it makes you want to keep playing just to see what the next bizarre organ replacement or spectral photograph phenomenon looks like. On top of that, each new verification test comes with a new micro-game to master. Draw this person’s blood without piercing the strange growth on their arm. Hunt for certain words in Rorschach test answers. Analyze elevator passengers to find eligible research subjects. It’s not huge, but it’s enough variety to keep the desk work from getting grindy. For a while.

Unfortunately, as fun as the game is on the micro scale, it falls apart on the macro scale. The game is split into three stages. During each of those stages, in addition to your regular desk work, you also need to assist with solving whatever catastrophe is currently ravaging the city. To accomplish this, you must mark certain individuals as research subjects, run experiments on them to gain knowledge about specific solutions, and then use that knowledge to launch city operations to combat the catastrophe.

So far so good. A little management sim to further spice up the grind of the desk work. But here’s the problem: this entire portion of the game is both critical to game progression and almost completely random. It’s random what kind of research subjects you find. It’s random how much useful information you’ll get from any given experiment. Sometimes you randomly just lose all your current research subjects due to freak reactions to certain experiments, and then you also lose a day of research cleaning up the aftermath.

It doesn’t seem like a huge problem at first, as the first few catastrophes progress fairly slowly, but by stage three, if you don’t have an advanced city operation unlocked within the first few days, you’re screwed. Not that the game will tell you you’re screwed. It will let you continue through the next 5-10 days of desk work, the catastrophe progress bar filling faster and faster each day, until you inevitably game over and realize that the last hour or two of gameplay was a complete waste of time.

And here’s the kicker: when you get to the end of the final stage, your reward is to enter the heart of the facility, whereupon you’re told that the only way to reach the end of the game is to go back and take every possible path through the game (i.e. solve every possible city catastrophe with every possible solution). This requires nine full playthroughs of the game. And in case you’re wondering, the actual gameplay is virtually identical on each path. It’s Shadow the Hedgehog all over again.

Final Score (3 Out of 5 Stars)

As rewarding as the minute-to-minute gameplay can be, the frustrating randomness in the city operations combined with the weak theming make it a little hard to recommend Security 51. It’s a game that will only be enjoyed by people who either absolutely loved the scintilliating document-checking action of Papers, Please or contribute to the SCP Wiki.

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Featured Image: Alawar