Lucas Pope marks 10 years of Papers, Please with a free demake for your browser

rockpapershotgun.com:

Dystopian border control simulator Papers, Please turns 10 years old this week, and developer Lucas Pope has marked the occasion by demaking it. Created in collaboration with Keiko Pope, the resulting browser-based LCD, Please "runs" on a mocked-up LCD console, akin to Nintendo's Game & Watch. Pope is also celebrating the anniversary by donating $100,000 to the International Rescue Committee.

The demake gives you the simplified strokes of the celebrated 2013 game: you're a border control officer, approving or denying entry to the fictional country of Arstotzka, which boils down to checking mugshots and bios against faces that, in this rendition, call to mind Rorschach blots. The representation of an LCD screen with "baked-in" graphics is impressive - I had to fight the urge to tilt my computer to catch the sunlight while playing.

Much has been written about Papers, Please and the line it treads between efficiency and empathy, together with the fine detail of its satire of the immigration process and Soviet bureaucracy. John Walker (RPS in peace) summarised it as follows in his original review. "Its lofi graphics and static setting join its focus on mundanity and repetition under pressure to suggest something that sounds about as far away from 'game' as you might imagine." But he added that it's "an engrossing, creeping affair, almost rogue-like in its grip on you to last longer, work faster, abandon principles more freely".

Graham called the way it balances obeying your government's directives and processing candidates quickly with showing kindness to the people you screen "an ethically interesting quandary", but noted that "you'll get the point pretty quickly". Playing the game in 2015, he found that "what makes me