Games about starting over: deportation, debt and second chances

Some stories are about winning. The ones that stay with people are often about starting again: arriving somewhere with one bag and no plan, owing money you cannot see a way to pay, being given a second chance and not quite knowing what to do with it. Games are good at these stories, because they make you live through the small steps, the first meal, the first job, the first payment, rather than skipping to the end.

This page is about a few games like that, including our own, which follows a man deported from London to Lagos. It is a sensitive subject, so a word first about the real thing.

Deportation is real, and it happens to real people

Being deported, or “removed”, means being made to leave a country by its government. For some people it means going back to a country they left as small children and barely know.

In the UK, the clearest recent example of how hard that can be is the Windrush scandal, which came to light in 2018. It affected people, mainly from the Caribbean, who had come to Britain before 1973, many as children, often on their parents’ passports and without documents of their own. Some were wrongly detained, lost jobs, homes and access to healthcare, and some were wrongly deported; by November 2018 the Home Office had confirmed 83 wrongful removals. The government apologised, set up a compensation scheme, and in 2020 published an independent review by Wendy Williams that found what happened had been “foreseeable and avoidable”.

We mention it not to make a point about policy, but because it shows something true: being sent “home” to a place that is not home is a real experience, for real families. Nothing in a game can stand in for that. If you are facing removal yourself, please talk to a qualified immigration adviser or lawyer.

The games

AJ Cities: deported to Lagos

Our game, free in your browser and 18+. Its hero, AJ, is fictional, and so is everyone around him.

AJ was born in Lagos and taken to London as a boy, at seven. He grew up in south London, picked up the accent, and never got his papers straight; there were letters, brown envelopes his mother put in the drawer under the cutlery, and then no money for the lawyer. When a party was raided and immigration checked everyone in the room, AJ was the one who could not prove he was allowed to be there. He was detained and put on a plane, with one bag.

Lagos does not welcome him back. Within days of landing he is swept up by police and held in a cell, where the other men call him “oyinbo”, a foreigner, because of how he talks. He walks out with nothing. Two weeks after London, he is on the veranda bench of Iloro House on June 12 Street, on the edge of Ajegunle, with Room 3, an empty wallet and one old friend.

The game is about the next steps. Chuks, who knew him as a boy, feeds him before asking a single question. Sarge, the retired soldier at the gatehouse window, tells him not to be ashamed of small money. The gate police want ₦2,500,000 before they will open the north gate, and AJ pays it a little at a time, from what he earns as a ball boy at the street football. And at the end of the street, a man in white linen called the Warden offers him a shortcut that may cost more than the debt.

It is not a sad game. The humour is street-level satire of authority, and AJ is proud, quick and funny when things are going badly. But it takes his situation seriously: the accent that marks him out, the feeling of being foreign in the country of your birth, and how much a plate of food from a friend can mean. You can read AJ’s story first, in six short chapters, starting with the night in London.

Venba

Visai Games, a studio in Toronto, released Venba in 2023. You play a mother from Tamil Nadu in southern India who moves to Toronto with her family in the 1980s. It is a cooking game, told through recipes: you restore a damaged family recipe book and cook dishes like idli, dosa and biryani, and the food becomes the bridge between first-generation parents and the children growing up in a new country. It is on Steam, the Mac App Store and Xbox Game Pass.

Citizen Sleeper

From Jump Over the Age, the one-person studio of Gareth Damian Martin, published by Fellow Traveller in 2022, later on PlayStation in 2023. You are a digital mind in an artificial body, on a space station, and the person whose mind you carry owes money to a corporation. The developer describes it as a game about precarity, personhood and freedom. It is science fiction, but anyone who has lived from one small payment to the next will recognise it.

Stardew Valley

Eric Barone, who works as ConcernedApe, released it in 2016. You inherit your late grandfather’s run-down farm and start again in a small town. It is the gentlest game here: a second chance with no police at the gate.

Papers, Please

Lucas Pope’s 2013 game puts you on the other side of the desk, as an immigration inspector at the border of a fictional country in 1982, checking documents and deciding who may cross as the rules change day by day. It is a hard, thoughtful game about what paperwork does to people, on both sides.

Why these stories matter

A game about starting over cannot fix anything. What it can do is let someone who has never been through it spend an hour in those shoes, and let someone who has see their story taken seriously. That is what we hoped for with AJ.

More: games like BitLife, but with a real story and Nigerian games for the diaspora.

Is there a game about being deported to Nigeria?

AJ Cities follows AJ, a fictional man deported from London to Lagos, starting again on the edge of Ajegunle. It is free in a browser and 18+.

Is AJ a real person?

No. AJ and everyone around him are fictional. Deportation itself is real, and the game tries to treat it with respect.

What was the Windrush scandal?

A UK scandal that came to light in 2018: people who came to Britain before 1973, many as children, were wrongly detained, denied rights and in some cases wrongly deported.

What other games are about starting over?

Our picks include Venba, Citizen Sleeper, Stardew Valley and Papers, Please.