The gameplay of Papers, Please focuses on the work life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for the fictional country of Arstotzka in the year 1982.

For each in-game day, the player is given specific rules on what documentation is required and conditions to allow entry, which become progressively more difficult over time.

The player may be challenged with moral dilemmas as the game progresses, such as allowing the supposed spouse of an immigrant through despite lacking complete papers at the risk of accepting a terrorist into the country.

[8] Pope opted to leave Naughty Dog around 2010, after Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was released, to move to Saitama, Japan, along with his wife Keiko, a game designer herself.

[9] From his travels in Asia and some return trips to the United States, he became interested in the work of immigration and passport inspectors: "They have a specific thing they're doing and they're just doing it over and over again.

Pope saw the opportunity to reverse those scenarios, putting the player in the role of the immigration officer to stop these types of agents, matching up with his existing gameplay mechanics.

[9] He crafted the fictional nation of Arstotzka, fashioned as a totalitarian, 1982 Eastern Bloc state, with the player guided to uphold the glory of this country by rigorously checking passports and defeating those that might infiltrate it.

[11] Pope also based aspects of the border crossing for Arstotzka and its neighbors on the Berlin Wall and issues between East and West Germany, stating he was "naturally attracted to Orwellian communist bureaucracy".

[10] Using a fictional country gave Pope more freedom in the narrative, not having to base events in the game on any real-world politics and avoiding preconceived assumptions.

[11] Work on the game began in November 2012; Pope used his personal financial reserves from his time at Naughty Dog for what he thought would be a few weeks worth of effort to complete and then move onto a more commercially viable title.

This also enabled him to include random and semi-random encounters, in which similar events would occur in separate games, but the immigrant's name or details would be different.

[9] After the Greenlight process, Pope started to add other features that required the player, as a lowly checkpoint worker, to make significant moral decisions within the game.

One such design was the inclusion of the body scanner, where Pope envisioned that the player would recognize this as an invasion of privacy but necessary to detect a suicide bomber.

[10] After being successfully voted on Greenlight, Papers, Please was being touted as an "empathy game", similar to Cart Life (2011), helping Pope to justify his narrative choices.

[17] With the iOS release, Apple required Pope to censor the full body scanner feature from the game, considering this aspect to be pornographic content.

[18] However, Apple later commented that the rejection was due to a "misunderstanding" and allowed Pope to resubmit the uncensored game by including a "nudity option".

[21] By March 2014, Pope stated that he was "kind of sick to death" of Papers, Please, in that he wanted to continue to focus on smaller games that would only take a few months of time to create and release, and had already spent far too much in his mind on this one.

[35] CBC News' Jonathan Ore called Papers, Please a "nerve-racking sleuthing game with relentless pacing and dozens of compelling characters – all from a desk job".

[45] Pope noted that he had not set out to make an empathy game, but the emotional ties created by his scenarios came about naturally from developing the core mechanics.

[61] Its success led Tkach and Ordynskiy to pursue a similar short film for Beholder, another game set in a totalitarian state.

[65] Ordynskiy would later voice Seaman Aleksei Toporov in Return of the Obra Dinn, a 2018 video game developed by Pope that was also a Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner.