Papers, Please dev’s next game will be ‘completely different’

Lucas Pope, the developer of critically acclaimed game Papers, Please, says his next title will be something "completely different." In other words, it might not be an empathy game.

“[It will be] something completely different, not even related at all to Papers, Please,” Pope told Edge. “I don’t know if people are going to be happy about that or not.”

“It’s always about the game first,” he said. “It’s always about a piece of interactive entertainment. It’s about which mechanics I think are good. I think whatever I do next, it’s always going to be kind of in service of that; I’m not going to start from the position of ‘I want people to feel empathy for this guy’ or ‘I want to get across this political point.’

"… It’s hard to come from the empathy side or the message side and then to try and make a fun game out of that."

Papers, Please released in August last year for PC and Mac. Players control an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint who faces different moral dilemmas.