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Papers, Please turns 10 and hits 5 million sales

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Papers, Please is a game about being an immigration officer in a fictional dystopian country named Arstotzka. It's quite a unique experience and clearly did well for the developer Lucas Pope.

On August 8th it turned 10 years old, and the official site notes it's now sold over 5 million copies. So that's somewhere around 500,000 copies a year. Considering this is from a solo developer, with a really simplistic graphics style it's genuinely very impressive.

Original trailer:

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More about it:

The communist state of Arstotzka has just ended a 6-year war with neighboring Kolechia and reclaimed its rightful half of the border town, Grestin.

Your job as immigration inspector is to control the flow of people entering the Arstotzkan side of Grestin from Kolechia. Among the throngs of immigrants and visitors looking for work are hidden smugglers, spies, and terrorists.

Using only the documents provided by travelers and the Ministry of Admission's primitive inspect, search, and fingerprint systems you must decide who can enter Arstotzka and who will be turned away or arrested.

Not only that, the developer even made their own little webgame demake named LCD, Please.

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Our contributor Samsai took a look at the game in an old episode of the GOL Cast.

Available to buy on Humble Store, GOG and Steam. It's also 80% off until August 12th to celebrate.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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7 comments

platinumspoons Aug 10, 2023
Glory to Arstotzka !
Klaas Aug 10, 2023
The graphics style may be simplistic with the reduced number of colours and low res, but it is well executed. That's something that many other developers fail to do.
BigJ Aug 10, 2023
Great, unique game.

I just bought The Return of Obra Dinn (same developer) and though Steam doesn’t show Linux as a supported platform, it’s working fine for me using Proton. 40% off right now, too.
wvstolzing Aug 10, 2023
I absolutely love this game; but I SUCK at it big time....

I wonder what happens to the guy from COBRASTAN further in the story.
Reyold Aug 10, 2023
It's also been reworked to run on modern OS's. I tried the DRM-free version from Humble Bundle and it runs without the need for 32-bit libraries.
Klaas Aug 10, 2023
Quoting: ReyoldIt's also been reworked to run on modern OS's. I tried the DRM-free version from Humble Bundle and it runs without the need for 32-bit libraries.
That's probably the switch from Haxe/OpenFL to Haxe/Unity that happened in March (?).


Last edited by Klaas on 10 August 2023 at 7:43 pm UTC
Reyold Aug 11, 2023
Quoting: Klaas
Quoting: ReyoldIt's also been reworked to run on modern OS's. I tried the DRM-free version from Humble Bundle and it runs without the need for 32-bit libraries.
That's probably the switch from Haxe/OpenFL to Haxe/Unity that happened in March (?).

That's right. Pope did discuss that in the Steam patch notes.

In my defense, I had no idea about any of this until I started checking my Humble library for Broforce's Forever update and noticed that Papers Please had also been recently updated.
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