Papers, Please is the reason a lot of us think about bureaucracy as a game mechanic at all, so I want to be upfront: "Sobakistan: The Land of Dogs" owes it a debt, and it works differently.

The setup: the Republic of Sobakistan is a closed country of anthropomorphic dogs. Its Supreme Leader stages a rehearsal of his own funeral to see how sincerely his people will grieve, and opens the borders for the occasion. You start as Henri Pascal, a chameleon journalist invited to cover it.

At the border your camera is confiscated. You're issued a state device instead: it writes text, takes low-resolution photographs, and tracks your location. That's your entire toolset for the rest of the game. You aren't stamping other people's documents - you're producing the document, and the state reads it too.

So the tension isn't "is this passport forged". It's: you saw something, you have one device, and everything you record can be used to establish where you were and who you spoke to. Being arrested isn't a fail state, it's written into the story.

It's 11 chapters and six playable characters, based on our comic from 2019. The experience combines a retro JRPG-style pixel aesthetic with dialogue puzzles, some stealth, and around 14 possible endings.

We're making a game about a totalitarian state where the paperwork you inspect is the paperwork you write yourself