Almost a decade after it propelled creator Lucas Pope to indie gaming fame, Papers, Please is coming to phones “a dystopian document thriller.” On Saturday, Pope took to Twitter to announce that he will be bringing the game to Android and additional iOS devices next month. “‘Papers, please,’ but small. August 5,” he said. Before Saturday’s announcement, the game had been available on iPads since 2014.
On Twitter, Pope said he spent about eight months developing the new port. Most of the work involved updating the user interface and making small tweaks to make the game playable on smaller screens. “No zooming,” Pope said in response to a question about the UI. “My vision is terrible and I wanted the game to feel natural on a phone, so the interface is built around that.”
For those hoping to play Papers, Please on PlayStation and Xbox, Pope also had news to share on the matter. “On track for console launch in 2031,” he joked. In a later tweet, Pope said the mobile version would be a standalone version, but if you already have the game on iPad, you’ll get free access.
The arrival of Papers, Please on phones will allow a new audience to experience one of the most creative games of the last decade. In Papers, Please, you play as a border control agent from a Soviet Bloc country known as Arstotzka. The game mainly involves checking the documentation of immigrants who want to enter Arstotzka and looking for discrepancies between all their entry forms. At almost every stage of its story experience, Papers, Please presents the player with moral dilemmas, asking them to consider how someone maintains their humanity in a job that is often heartless.
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