Developer: Hiscory
Platforms: PC (Reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Genre: Adventure, Indie, Simulation
Publisher: Hiscory, Gamersky Games
Teller’s Duty is a narrative 1980s dystopian banking simulator that plays a bit like Papers, Please, except here you’re working as a bank teller inside Kertasia Bank, handling strict government rules, risky customers, and moral choices while trying to earn enough money to pay for your mother’s medical bills.
In 1980, you land a teller job at Kertasia Bank thanks to your distant uncle, and you quickly get pulled into a world where strange government policies shape everything you do. Your shift starts at 9 am and runs until the afternoon, where you handle customer requests like withdrawals and deposits while also keeping an eye out for scams and fake documents.
The game has a simple but very interactive UI. You have a notebook that holds all the rules and manuals, and a fax machine that alerts you when you make a mistake. As you progress, the game’s evolving bureaucracy slowly adds more rules you need to follow, like carefully checking IDs, dates, stamps, names, and other details to make sure everything matches official regulations. If anything is off, or if a fake ID or stamp is used, you reject the form. Withdrawals also require you to manually count cash using stacks of bills and a money counter machine, which makes the process feel very hands-on.
The mechanics steadily build as you play, and you start running into more complex scams and situations that require real attention to detail. It really gives you that feeling of actually working as a bank teller, and at first you will likely make mistakes, but it quickly becomes a learning process as you get more comfortable with the system.
One of the core parts of the game is its crushing moral choices, where you are forced to enforce strict state policies to afford life-saving medicine for your mother, or risk your job to secretly help citizens. This ties directly into its focused narrative, which is a grim paper-dystopia story featuring over 100 unique customers and multiple endings across a fairly short playtime.
As a teller, you meet a wide range of customers with different personalities and appearances, from frequent visitors to rare ones. You can engage in small conversations, although after a while those pre-document dialogues can start to feel a bit repetitive.
The art style is one of the strongest parts of the game, featuring a scrapbook-like paper aesthetic with muted colours that really fit the bleak world. The animations, facial expressions, and character designs all feel alive, almost like real people pulled from old documents or newspapers, which makes the world feel very grounded and unique.
Outside of work, you manage your earnings after each shift, deciding what to spend on food, savings, taxes, and your mother’s care. Small moments like adopting a cat and looking after it daily add a nice bit of warmth to an otherwise stressful experience. You can also view a log of customers you’ve met, which slowly builds more depth around the people you encounter.
There is good variety as you progress, but some days can feel quite similar and slow, which can affect pacing, especially when compared to shifts that move much faster. It can get a bit repetitive, but that doesn’t take away from how addictive the gameplay loop is, as it’s easy to fall into the rhythm of “just one more day” once you start playing.
Even though Teller’s Duty is single-player, we were given another code to test out the game. The other player, Moody, had the following to say: “Teller’s Duty is such a fun and cute game (even though it may not look cute, the gameplay is relaxing to an extent). The storytelling, graphics, and art style are really adorable and amazing. I truly enjoyed the game. It’s a game I never even knew existed, but it is clearly my type of game. It really shows how immigrants work, feeling lonely and working not for themselves, but to provide for their families back home. Living lonely and unhealthy lives while sacrificing yourself to provide. Amazing game.”
Teller’s Duty is a tense but engaging narrative sim that mixes routine banking work with moral choices and an evolving set of rules. The addictive loop of the game, through checking documents and adhering to rules, makes this game more intricate than it seems. If you’re after a unique simulation with real weight behind every shift, Teller’s Duty is worth checking out!
Overall: 8/10
This is S & S. We are world game explorers. We play games. We have played over 10,000+ games! We travel, we write reviews AND we play more games!!!!
