Article
The everyday lives of videogame characters
A new type of game explores the aesthetic of the mundane.
Tag: Papers, Please
News
The release of Papers, Please for iPad is a commentary on border policing
Is technology improving the ways we screen those entering and exiting our countries?
Review
This War of Mine is not fun, but you should still play it
11 bit Studios’ war simulator forces you to make horrible decisions.
News
Lucas Pope finds his procedural zen
The follow-up to Papers, Please is looking lovely and decidedly lo-fi.
News
Big Pharma combines pretty pastel color scheme with withering cynicism
British Developer Twice Encircled has announced Big Pharma, a game which puts you in the deeply conflicted shoes of a c-level suit at a pharmaceutical conglomerate. It follows the Tycoon playbook: soft, twee visual design over top a game of space and resource management. As in the canonical Kairosoft and Tycoon games, you’ll tirelessly work to minimize some numbers and maximize others, tweaking an optimal profit with nary a thought to the souls you employ. Big Pharma, obviously, takes it one step further: you’re not building railroads or videogames here but pills, which might cure diseases, make people happier, or give them back…
News
Rules! is a cute phone-sized dictator
Do as it says.
News
A quaint game about raising a family… in the nuclear apocalypse
Sheltered, a cool-looking management sim on Kickstarter, has all the down-to-earth trials and tribulations of daily family life. You provide food and shelter for your loved ones, repair home appliances, make a quick run to the store, take care of the pets, and, uh, defend your fallout bunker from the ambush of post-nuclear war vagabonds. We’ve all been through that, right? There sure does seem to be an abundance of games about people going through hard times of late. This one gives me a Papers, Please meets Jason Rohrer’s The Castle Doctrine vibe—maybe there’s a hint of Oregon Trail in…
News
The Westport Independent plans to pick up where Papers, Please left off
Digging through game jam games is hard work, so thanks to those who mined The Westport Independent from the veritable pile of games that Ludum Dare consistently produces. Instantly visually and thematically similar to Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and his earlier title The Republica Times, The Westport Independent proposes to take us a step further, setting the game inside the borders of a totalitarian state that has set out to dissolve any independent entities—and, especially, your publication. As you are sent articles each day, you choose what will or won’t be censored from the each week’s issue, your choices gathering either loyalist suspicion or rebel…
News
New trailer for The Official has modern workforce ennui, jaggy PS1-era polygons
The Official is another game about the angst of the work force. It’s based on that familiar daydream that anyone who sits behind at desk from 9-5 has doubtlessly imagined: the one where you fall asleep on your stack of papers and awake after hours alone in a strange alternate version of your office space, which now looks eerily similar to a PlayStation game. It seems there have been a lot of these games about people who are bored to death or otherwise hate their jobs lately: The Stanley Parable, I Get This Call Every Day, Papers, Please, potentially. Has…