Here’s an advertisement I got from a game company named Rogue Duck Interactive.

Rogue Duck Interactive@rogueducknet

Start your cozy airport security job!👮🏻‍♂️

Weigh and scan bags, ask passengers questions, and if you are not convinced, search their luggage for dangerous items.

Wishlist on Steam!

Thu Aug 28 05:05:07 +0000 2025

The game they’re advertising here — which they neglect to name outside the screenshot — is “Nothing to Declare.”¹ And it caught my eye, because there’s problems.

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 shameless 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.

SUPERHOT VR released in 2017. Then in 2021 the game’s entire story was removed.

What’s happened here is fascinating, but somehow nobody has talked about it seriously. Because it’s censorship in a video game — a topic the gaming community cannot be normal about — it is nearly impossible to even think about the issue through all the noise. Anyone aware of this topic at all seems to be screaming about Woke, or complaining about games becoming “political”, as if “political” is just a switch you can throw to make media worse.

Wikipedia summarizes the discourse as:

The choice to remove these games led to the game getting review bombed on Steam, with some users claiming that Superhot Team was giving in to “snowflakes” and others believing it to be a form of virtue signaling

But this is insane! A historically significant VR game — one of the greatest of all time — had one of its defining characteristics removed, without any explanation or replacement. This isn’t some Stellar Blade fake controversy, something weird happened here. There are real, understandable things to object to, and none of them are right-wing culture war buzzwords.

But what is SUPERHOT?

SUPERHOT was originally developed for the 2013 7 Day FPS Challenge game jam by Polish team “The Bricky Blues”, directed by Piotr Iwanicki. In September 2013 it was released on the Blue Brick Software and Embedded Systems website in three separate “episodes” because the levels were developed in parallel in three separate unity projects for the jam.

After the demo received positive feedback, SUPERHOT went to Kickstarter (after they got Kickstarter to support Poland) and was successfully overfunded in June 2014. (With the success of SUPERHOT, the Blue Brick company seems to have been abandoned.) SUPERHOT (2016) was then released in February.

Did you know there are still people who think the MCU’s Thanos is a deep character with interesting motivations? For all the CinemaSins “why didn’t he use his powers to end scarcity, is he stupid” types, there are still “Thanos did nothing wrong” chuds.

This is stupid, of course. But after seeing people be wrong on the internet, it occurred to me recently that there are a couple of genuinely interesting ways to spin the character without changing his mechanical role in the story. In fact, with just a tiny bit of re-framing, you can turn Thanos from a stupid dumb-dumb into a genuinely great villain.

Why Thanos doesn’t work

First, a super-quick summary of what I’m reacting to.

Gris

Last week, looking for a game to play to wind down at night in bed, I went through my backlog of unplayed Steam games and filtered for something that looked relaxing. I fished out Gris.

Gris is intriguing, atmospheric, and gorgeously animated. It’s a beautiful indie title.
And I kinda hate it?

If you asked me what I expect “VR” to look like, I would answer lowpoly, wireframes, etc. You know, the SUPERHOT vibe, or the crisp plastic cartoon vibe of Virtual Virtual Reality or VRChat, or maybe even a little Quadrilateral Cowboy. Boneworks is not that. Instead of freely-manipulated wireframes and polygons, we get… this:

Boneworks’ aesthetic goes in a wildly different direction. Everything in the world is industrial and thoroughly utilitarian. There is a deliberate theme of substantiation rather than abstraction permeating the game’s design.

At first I thought it was a visual gag (“What’s this barrel full of, anyway? Oh, data, haha”), but no, it’s consistent throughout the universe and turns out to be a core part of the world.

Boneworks takes tasks like calculation and positioning and sorting and deletion, — tasks that in real life are performed by physical hardware but that we have abstracted into the realm of ideas and decisions and design — and says NO! In this space, where they should be abstracted most of all, these things are machines, and they’re individual machines, and you’re going to look at every one of them.

I love this approach, both for its aesthetic effects and for its function as a storytelling device.

The following are exerpts from my fully transcribed playthrough of Psycholonials, which I wrote last summer. If you aren’t familiar with psycholonials or haven’t played the game, I recommend reading that to catch up.

If you’ve already played Psycholonials though, here’s some food for you. Exerpts though, not the whole thing.

or, “W.D. Gaster undercuts Undertale’s cohesiveness as a work”

When a very young Gio wrote The Raphael Parable, I updated it with a little ARG. “The ARG Update”, I called it. There were scattered clues, and a puzzle, and secret notes so the diligent scavenger could piece together what really happened. Except nothing did really happen. There wasn’t a story I wanted to tell, there wasn’t an interesting mystery to solve, there were just clues tied to more clues tied to an arbitrary ending. It was hopefully fun to follow, but it was the trappings of mystery without any of the meaning.

Petscop, on the other hand, has a substantial depth to it because it keeps tying itself to reality. The viewer is given a real person recording themselves playing a game. It’s set in our world. The game itself seems to be intricately tied to real-world events; too. Disappearances, the player’s family, even the YouTube account managing the videos. Petscop tells a deep mystery story because the mystery is backed by a story: a death, an abuse, a revenge. There’s meat to the mystery.

Sans (Undertale) is a fun character. He’s spooky. He breaks an unbreakable log, he teleports, he’s figured out something about the timelines. Then there’s a fight with Sans, where he’s very tough and has a gun. Then he needed a backstory for his gun and science, and we got Gaster, who is almost those things. Gaster was a fun idea, though, so he got some extra Easter eggs. We get room_gaster, the gaster followers, Mysteryman, the wrong number song, and the sound test. He’s fun, and mysterious, and ended up carrying most of the mysterious lore bits of Undertale that were never quite explained.