The Money Man

The Game

Three hundred years ago, everyone with somewhere better to be left Earth for Mars. You live in what they left behind: New Earth's New York, where the signs still glow but nothing behind them works, sealed off from the people who escaped.

You work a desk in a back room. A crime family paid the medical bills for someone you love, and now they hold that person until your debt clears. The job is simple. You tell the real money from the fake.

Most of the game happens here, at the desk. A visitor sets money down. You have tools to tell real from fake, and two calls to make. Tap any tool to see what it does.

The Desk

The back room desk. Everything you use to tell real money from fake. Tap any item to look closer.

Accept — into the vault Reject — into the reject zone

Any check wrong means counterfeit. There are two ways to make a mistake: clear a fake, and the family takes the loss. Reject real money, and you ruin someone who had nothing left. Every mistake costs you.

A noir verification sim scored in modal and ambient jazz. For anyone who lost sleep to Papers, Please and Not Tonight.

31
In-Game Days: 3
Acts: 9
Endings: PC
On Steam

Devlog

Notes from the desk. Development updates, behind-the-scenes, and progress on the build.

Devlog 01

Why We Are Building The Money Man

Ask us what shaped us most as creators and we will tell you Cowboy Bebop before we tell you any game. The jazz, the moral weight, the way it makes you feel cool and completely devastated at the same time. We have been trying to make things that feel like that ever since.

Papers Please

We played Papers Please for the first time in 2024, more than a decade after it came out. What got us was not the mechanics or the design. It was the immersion. The anthem plays over the main menu and you are already in Arstotzka before you press start. Before a single document crossed the desk we were somewhere real.

Part of what made that world feel so alive was the newspaper. Every morning before your shift it handed you a slice of what was happening outside the checkpoint. Protests. Policy changes. It colored everything that came after. You felt like the world existed beyond the four walls of your booth.

But you could not touch it. You read it and you moved on. The world stayed behind glass. And we kept coming back to the same question: how do we make a game where you can actually step into that world?

Lotus

We are a story first studio. We love stories more than almost anything. And that love is exactly what got us into trouble with Lotus: Lost Memories.

We built Lotus story first. The world was decided, the characters were decided, and then we tried to build a game around all of it. The mechanics never caught up. People who played it felt the story. We felt everything underneath it that was not working. We shipped it, we were proud of what it was, and we spent a long time afterward thinking about where it fell short.

The lesson was not that story does not matter. Story is everything to us. The lesson was that we needed to find a mechanic first that we believed in, because we already knew that given any mechanic we could build a world worth living in. We just had to start in the right place.

Respite

After Lotus we started building Respite. It had something real in it. A feeling of longing we were trying to capture. If we pulled it off it would have been something genuinely special.

But the further we got, the more it started to feel like Lotus again. A world and a feeling we loved, and a gameplay question we had not answered. Neither of us said that out loud. We just kept building.

Somewhere in the middle of that, The Money Man showed up. A counterfeit checker working a desk in the back room of a crime family. It was our answer to the Papers Please question, and it would not leave us alone.

We did not switch. Not yet. We kept working on Respite and fleshed the idea out on the side: the family, the debt, the desk, the bills.

The Switch

Then came the speakeasy idea, and it came from Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. We loved how open and chill that game is. A slice of life you just exist in. What if the back room where you verify money was the back room of a speakeasy? What if you could put the work down and just be in the bar?

We both said yes immediately, without even discussing it. Respite went on the shelf. The Money Man became the game.

The speakeasy felt different from the first second because it was not just a world idea or a story idea. It was a mechanic and a story at the same time. Which is exactly what we had been trying to find since Lotus shipped.

What the Speakeasy Actually Is

The answer to the question we had been asking since Papers Please.

The backroom where you verify money is the back room of a speakeasy. Literally. Walk through the door and you are in the bar. Walk back and you are at the desk. The same building. You can grab a drink, light a smoke, play darts, sit in a corner and just exist in the city for a while. And if you listen, what you overhear comes back to the desk with you. A rumor changes how you read the next bill. A name you heard at the bar shows up in the ledger. The information is yours because you were present for it.

The world is no longer behind glass. You are inside it.

That is what we took from Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. That game understands what it means to just be somewhere. We wanted that same weight inside a game where what you learn actually costs something.

Without the speakeasy The Money Man is just another desk game. With it, it is the game we have been wanting to play since the day we opened Papers Please.

Private playtesting is opening soon. Follow us here and on Steam to be the first to know when applications open.
Ahamed and Sava — Fenyx Digital