Papers, Please gets a Japanese-language version

The critically-lauded indie game Papers, Please has been available on Steam for a while now, meaning you can buy it just about anywhere. But that wasn’t much help for non-English-speakers who wanted to experience the game—which the developer calls a “dystopian document thriller”—in their own language. But there’s good news on that front: according to developer Lucas Pope (who was inspired to make the game by his experiences with immigration in Japan, incidentally), a new version of the game with support for more languages (including Japanese) will go live on February 12. Additionally, the game will now also run on Linux.

Papers, Please puts players in the shoes of a passport inspection agent at a border crossing into the fictional (but clearly Communist-inspired) nation of Arstotska. In the game, you must assess visitors’ documentation for inconsistencies according to an increasingly complex scheme that’s passed down from higher authorities. The more people you process in a day, the more money you can make. The catch: every mistake gets taken out of your paycheck, and at the end of each day you have to decide what to spend money on to keep your family alive. Make even a few mistakes—which is easy to do—and you’ll soon find yourself having make choices like buying food for your children or medicine for your sick wife.

As you might imagine, it’s not a particularly “fun” game in the traditional sense, but it is a very unique and thought-provoking one. It’s nice to see the game available in additional languages including Japanese, but I’d love to see even more Asian languages added to the game in the near future. I’d be particularly interested to see the game translated into Chinese and Vietnamese. Arstotka and its neighboring nations are clearly based on the former Soviet bloc, but it would nevertheless be fascinating to see how gamers in modern Communist states would react to the game and its message.