papers please

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years you might not recognize this as the gameplay from Papers, Please.

Papers, Please (2013), of course, is the multi-million-selling dystopian bureaucracy simulator game where you work as an immigration enforcement officer for a despotic regime.

Papers is known as one of the games of all time. It uses the mechanics of rote bureaucracy — checking correctness of paperwork, matching dates, enforcing documentation requirements — to connect the player to a cruel and miserable world. The message and mechanics perfectly intertwine: the dystopia is entwined with the nature of the policing, which is both the setting and the game mechanic.

It’s an intense, profound piece that prompts the player to think about the way political structures affect real human lives. It prompts introspection about the role and agency of the individual within a system and how morality responds when someone is faced with a hard reality: a political and economic moment where harming others for profit may be the only way to feed your own family. Papers is “video games as true art”, “brilliantly written”, “grim yet affecting”

Rogue Duck hasn’t been living under a rock. They know their game “takes inspo” from Papers, Please, but it has its own “original take and ideas.”

Rogue Duck Interactive@rogueducknet

@sensdertale Team definitely likes and takes inspo from Papers, Please. But I think both games can exist together, and I guarantee we will have our own original take and ideas in it.

Sun Sep 07 02:51:36 +0000 2025

but cozy

Now, I don’t care that Rogue Duck is iterating on Papers. What’s hooked me here is this original take they’re so excited about. Because Declare is more than a shamless clone: it has its own identity and it does have something to say. Nothing to Declare comes on stage following Papers, turns to the audience, and what it has to say is: “man, that guy was a downer, am I right?”

That fun new original idea Rogue Duck adds to the equation is that now the bureaucracy of immigration is fluffy and wholesome. A fun little action parallel to making postcards and pouring coffee.

This isn’t even an interpretation, they shoehorn it right in their store description.

In a wholesome setting, weigh and scan bags, ask passengers questions, and if you are not convinced, search their luggage for dangerous items.
…
Welcome to Nothing To Declare
Ever wondered what it’s like to work airport security… without the stress? In Nothing To Declare, you step into a cozy, hand-drawn world where your job is to keep things safe, with just a sprinkle of suspicion.

From weighing luggage to scanning x-rays and questioning quirky travelers, every shift brings surprises (and the occasional questionable electronic device). Use your judgment and intuition to decide: do you let it through… or unzip and investigate?
…
There’s nothing to declare… except a good time.

Security is stressless! The world is cozy! Suspicion is cute and sprinkled! Travelers are quirky!

But even if they weren’t incredibly explicit about it, every ounce of the design tells the same story. The entire design language tells you this world wants to cuddle. Every corner is shiny, every corner is beveled, every character is young and attractive. The goon who drags a would-be traveler off gives you a smirk and bedroom eyes through the fourth wall as he does it.

And I’m not writing this off as being generically pleasant, either. Just as Paper’s gritty, utilitarian, soviet design language was part of what the piece communicated, so is this. Choosing to take a political idea like this and assert that it is pleasant — that it can be pleasant — is asserting an explicitly ideological position.

So what’s gone wrong here?

This is the young witch in the alps problem.

Cozy game designers trying to craft the trappings of niceness without “grime”, but in doing so totally miss what’s meaningful about the work they’re trying to emulate. It’s a fetishization of comfort.

it’s bad if you think about it

As is so often the case it’s not clear whether this is evil or just brain-empty. The more you think through it the worse it is.

Declare takes the already unpleasant reality of immigration enforcement and merges it with — of all things — the post-9/11 airport security position which has only ever existed as a part of the war on terror. This isn’t lampshaded in the fiction of the game: the description for the game pitches that you’re doing all this because “It could be a bomb.”

Airport security is a wild profession to whitewash because I don’t know of any group anywhere along the political isle that thinks it’s good. Conservatives see it as representative of the tragedy that travel represents danger, liberals see it as security theater, and leftists see it as a dangerous extension of policing power. And they’re all right!

This institution is what Rogue Duck is choosing to paint as cozy and wholesome. Declare is an aggressive attempt at sanitizating a disturbing thing. In the trailer they show a minigame where you use a scanner to see through the clothing of an attractive young woman with no grounds for suspicion. They’re using policing itself as a gameplay loop but without any of the darkness it deserves. In fact, they’re very intentionally depriving it of weight.

The fact that Declare so clearly derives from Papers makes this much worse. This works if you do the work of making a structural change such that the work in the utopia is fundamentally different from the work in the dystopia, but that hasn’t been done. They’ve tweaked the lighting, adjusted the design, shifted the political metaphor, but the fundamental work of policing that was so rightfully criticized as evil remains present. They’ve simply taken the dystopian and declared it wholesome as-is.

Or perhaps they’re not taking something evil and declaring it good. Perhaps they don’t think there’s a difference between good and bad things.

Imagine that everything is structurally neutral. The security in airport security isn’t a practice to protect anything from anything else, it’s just a motion. There are no implications to the necessity of security, no darkness involved in threats, no danger posed by enforcement.

The trailer also shows you finding a power saw in a man’s luggage. What’s that mean? What does it mean for someone to try to bring a weapon on an airplane? What would have been done with an uncaught saw, gun, bomb? Who would have used it and how? You’re not supposed to consider any of that. There are just two lists, and the game is to play at pattern recognition without thinking even a little bit about the world you’re in. Security is merely a motion that happens in life like branches waving in the wind. We can depict it, as is, losing nothing by isolating an event from context.

If you are an empty person and see the world as empty of value, this makes perfect sense. Papers wasn’t a look into the meaning of anything, it just combined its subject with dreariness because they had to pick something to do for atmosphere.

The policing work in Papers is structurally neutral too. Detaining humans isn’t an action with any substance in and of itself, it’s just an action that can happen. In that case the only thing keeping it from being sweet and inoffensive would be a coat of paint. Now the desk is blue instead of brown and you feel good instead of bad. Detaining migrants can just as easily be turned into relaxing and mediative gameplay, because everything is just shells that contain whatever content you inject for today’s product.

actually, it’s all cozy

The more you think through it the worse it is, but it’s very possible I’m the first person to think about this at all, including the developers. They’re sanitizing something disturbing here, but I don’t think it’s fascist propaganda, I think it’s just bleaching out the grain of to sell it as a product. Art is second to comfort here.

“Rogue Duck” makes a lot of these identical-looking cozy and wholesome games produced at a suspicious pace. Rogue Duck Interactive does own the rogueduck.net address, but it just redirects to their Steam profile. Declare is probably just another in a list of uncomfortable jobs turned into stim games, like Cozy Lemonade Stand and Cozy Supermarket and Cozy Recycling Facility. Jobs are the same and they should all be wholesome. Video games shouldn’t be art, Duck argues: they’re content.

But if the issues with subject matter are due to a lack of care, flipping through the “Rogue Duck Interactive Franchise” (not what the word means!) shows there’s a smiliar lack of care in their other work.

Looking at their portfolio, Rogue Duck makes a lot of these identical-looking cozy and wholesome games. This includes Witchy Business, which is quite literally about a young witch and her cat.

But also on this list is Rentlord, a landlord simulation game where you “maximize rent while avoiding taxes.” It’s also a Balatro clone, somehow.

Their reviews have been mixed so far, but maybe they’re hoping to turn that around with the new Eviction Update. “If someone isn’t pulling their weight? Evict them. No hesitation. Sometimes eviction leads to more rent” Slumlord DLC coming soon! No, really, that’s the roadmap.

There’s also cozy wholesome shipping fulfillment warehouse. Cute postal infrastructure game? No, you’re literally packaging items in boxes, it’s a cute cozy Amazon fulfillment center, that’s the game.

Wait, actually, is that the same conveyor belt graphic?

It totally is, that’s fully copy-pasted.

thanks