Feature
Always Sometimes Monsters combines Atlas Shrugged with Hotline Miami
The results, they are mixed.
Tag: Papers, Please
News
Factorio gives the middle finger to SimCity’s vision of industrial utopia
SimCity is about building a flourishing biome where citizens can live without dying of smog. Factorio, contrarily, says screw that. It is a game about wrecking the environment by building sprawling, Rube-Goldbergian, obscene, waste-shitting factories out of conveyer belts and tens of thousands of claw arms. Judging from the new trailer, it loosely fits alongside games like Papers, Please and Prison Architect inside the very trendy space of legitimately good games making a statement for a social cause by having you make awful choices to win. And the cause here I suspect is pollution, as you can see in the…
News
Lucas Pope’s new game The Sea Has No Claim searches through an airplane’s wreckage
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News
Riot aims to politicize the board game with, what else, riots
We’ve seen a lot of great videogames that deal with social issues, but we haven’t seen that many boardgames. The crew of Italians behind Riot want to change that by putting you in the shoes of a citizen who is caught in a dangerous riot situation, where tension between protesters and officers is erupting into violence. The rules and design behind this unorthodox take definitely looks interesting, and as we’ve seen with great games like Papers, Please and Cart Life, the structures of injustice can make for some very compelling and unconventional play—you know, unlike actual riots. The designers are…
News
Pretty much everyone ever owns and plays Dota 2 (apparently)
The dark fantasy esport Dota 2 is undeniably Steam’s killer app, according to the number-crunching-smiths at Ars Technica, who found that over 25 million copies have been downloaded and played on Valve’s popular digital download service. We shouldn’t be shocked that such a hardcore, complex game—even one that takes months of practice to achieve anything close to competence—would be the game that everyone owns and plays, considering that Dota 2 is a worldwide phenomena, and that Steam is the only way to play it. Ars’ numbers are dominated by hardcore, competitive games. With the exception of Portal, the top ten…
News
Papers, Please’s Lucas Pope says "AAA" and "indie" are useless distinctions. We applaud
We have comments by another so-called “indie” game auteur disavowing any interest in this whole indie-ness business. This time it’s Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope, who, speaking at the BAFTA Games Awards this week, said that there are no indie game-makers, just individuals and studios making small games and large games. To be honest yeah, I feel [these labels] are a little redundant…. A lot of those games are very successful, so the categorization of indie games and triple-A is kind of dissolving a little bit. We’ve beat this drum before and we will keep beating on it because the…
News
Some awesome modder created Papers Please’s totalitarian regime in Civ 5
Despite being the locale for one of our favorite games of last year, traveling to Arstotzka is probably not advised. However, it’s a fine place to go to war, now that a modder has created the fictional state in the Brave New World expansion of Civilization 5. The beautiful thing here, aside from the fact that the modder goes by Snakeeater337 (Snakeeater 336 was taken, apparently), is that he has taken great pains to remain true to the details of the fiction of Lucas Pope’s game. The artwork is in line, and he even creating a march from the game’s…
News
This behind-the-scenes look at Papers, Please proves that we need a director’s cut
The baggage search is reason enough.
Review
Papers, Please makes you a cog in the machine
Lucas Pope’s immigration agent sim explains the mechanics of oppression