You are a worker for border control of a Soviet-like authoritarian government. The border is being open for the first time since a war with a neighboring country. Each day you are charged for rent, food, and heat. You are paid per person you let through the border. You are punished for letting through people who should not be let through. The rules arbitrarily change. You need to make decisions between letting people in or not based on whether or not their documents are fraudulent. To do this you need to review their documents. This is fairly easy but it is difficult to keep track of all the rules and because the amount of space you have is limited, you have to constantly shuffle things around to be able to check stuff. The longer you take, the fewer people you can serve in a day which is bad for your ability to pay rent and keep your family alive. But the faster you go, the more likely you are to make errors--errors that could get you fined, fired, or arrested. You might get a case that breaks your heart, like a husband who gets through and a wife who can't. Do you let her through? If you have a heart, of course you'll be moved, but what if she's a terrorist and blows herself up just on the other side. It's a constant tug-of-war. Of course... given the cruelty of the government you work for, is it even a bad thing if you work to help people undermine it?
It's a political comment on the heartlessness that arises from the bureaucratization and routinatization of totalitarian thought; it's a social comment on what happens to an individual put into a situation with no good options; and it's an interesting game that tests attention to detail in a way that most games don't.
Now you get it.