“Video games are multidisciplinary,” writes Simon Parkin in Game Changers: The Video Game Revolution, a hulking coffee table tome from 2023 chronicling the many captivating experiences devised for this medium. “They typically require the eye of an artist, the ear of a musician, the pen of a writer, the purpose of a designer, and the logic of a programmer,” states the foreword to the book.
Remarkably, Lucas Pope is all of these things. As a result, he has earned a reputation as independent gaming’s pre-eminent icon. In 2013, Pope singlehandedly created and released Papers, Please, following it up with The Return Of The Obra Dinn five years later. The former charged players with the role of a border-crossing officer, deciding the fates of a beleaguered legion of immigrants in the imagined, dystopic Cold War-era totalitarian state of Arstotzka. The latter rewound to the 1800s, catapulting players onto the deck of an East India Company ghost ship and asking them to unravel – for insurance purposes – a deathly mystery.
