ip-please/ip-please.github.io

A compact, free browser satire built on the Papers, Please document-checking loop. If you have half an hour and enjoy bureaucratic deduction puzzles, it is easy to try; if you want a large, moddable game framework, look elsewhere.

The problem

You want a short game that turns a tedious real-world chore into a puzzle. Here the chore is border inspection: a traveller arrives, you drag their documents onto the desk, compare them against a rulebook, and decide whether to stamp approve or deny. The friction in most narrative puzzle games is the gap between reading rules and applying them; this one closes that gap by making each day's new rule a new document type or tool you must check. After deciding, you return the documents and advance the queue, so the result is a completed inspection round rather than a lore dump.

What's different

The theme is the mechanism. Travellers claim to be from a region while their timezone, language or account details contradict the claim, and later days add X-ray scans of background processes, slang quizzes and corporate ownership checks. Each of the six days introduces one new rule or tool, which keeps the puzzle from becoming a single repeated comparison. The whole thing runs as a static page with no external resources, and the README says double-clicking index.html after downloading the repository also works, so a local copy is not just a demo link. Dialogue, pixel art and sound are generated in code rather than shipped as audio files, which keeps the footprint small but also means the presentation is deliberately lo-fi. The trade-off is scope: six days, two endings, roughly 30 minutes, and the maintainers explicitly ask that new mechanics go into forks rather than the main line.

Who should try it

Good fit: someone who liked the inspection loop in Papers, Please and wants a short, self-contained parody that can be finished in one sitting on a phone (landscape, touch) or desktop (mouse). The bilingual start screen matters if you want to share it with an English-speaking friend; the README notes that jokes that do not translate are explained in the daily newspaper's translation notes. Poor fit: anyone expecting a general game engine, a long campaign or a project that accepts gameplay PRs. The README points would-be modders to fork and register their work, and several forks are already listed, including a 12-day extended cut, a 14-day story with 30 endings and an Android 8.0+ port. If you want more content, those forks are the documented path.

Requirements and limitations

It is a static web page, so a browser is the only hard requirement; the online version is the simplest path, and the README describes running python -m http.server for local preview. If you change Chinese dialogue or character art, the README says you must rebuild assets.js with a Python asset pipeline, and edited Chinese lines must be mirrored exactly in en.js, with node tools/check_en.js to catch missing translations. That upkeep is real for anyone who wants to localise or reskin the game, even though playing it requires none of it. The repository's license is listed as NOASSERTION on GitHub while the README claims MIT for the code and separately credits the bundled pixel font under the SIL Open Font License; check the actual license files before redistributing assets.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo first recorded this project on 2026-10-24, when it was six days old, and logged 345 total stars at #19 on the JavaScript NEW-REPOSITORY board (新项目榜, not the overall Trending board) on 2026-10-25. That is a two-date snapshot, so persistence cannot be judged. The concrete thing to verify before forking it for your own mod is how the exact-match translation keys in en.js behave when you reword a line, since the README treats a one-character mismatch as a broken translation rather than a warning.