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.

Haptic feedback is really important

Haptic feedback is really important. Even though it’s just vibration, the difference between feeling something and feeling nothing when you touch things is worlds. The vibration does a decent job of simulating the feeling of resistance and letting you “feel out” the world, which is very important in games where the alternative is getting your prop stuck in a shelf.

You can actually stream games and it works

When I first saw that the recommended way to play PC games was over local wifi, I thought “no way. There’s no way you can get a high-quality video stream at that resolution with those latency requirements over wifi. I’m going to get a good USB cable and stream directly at 300 mbps and it’ll be excellent.” Turns out, no! With my (fairly normal) router, Virtual Desktop can stream a steady game at 1832x1920@60fps x2 over ~70 mbps with an imperceptible loss in quality. (Those numbers mean it’s good.) The connection is actually way more reliable than using the USB connection, and the Virtual Desktop app has a unified game launcher for both Rift and Steam which works great. If you look closely at dark areas you can see some artifacts, but in general I think this is a case where the video compression is extremely effective.

The Weird Genealogy of The Raphael Parable

The Stanley Parable itself started as a mod. The original published version is a Half-Life 2 mod from 2011, of which the 2013 Steam release is an HD remix. The Source Engine, which Half-Life 2 is built on, makes it easy to author a set of new maps and release it as a “sourcemod”. Sourcemods are a fascinating artifact of Valve history, and function as a kind of mod support for source games built directly into the Steam client. Davey Wreden did exactly this to make The Stanley Parable; he took the basic 3D engine and a few generic office-themed assets and made a completely new experience.