Apple rejected one of the best games of the year over pixelated nudity

If you've ever played the fantastic Windows or Mac versions of Papers, Please you already know how fantastic of a fit it will be on iPad when it launches on Friday. The game -- referred to as a "dystopian document thriller" by its creator -- tasks you with screening immigrants at the border of a war-torn country. Its debut on iOS is nearly upon us, but the game's developer, Lucas Pope, revealed today that it was initially rejected by Apple due to "pornographic content." Yikes.

In the game, it's up to you to check identifications, verify permits, and in some cases put suspicious individuals through an x-ray scanning device. The resulting images often reveal bombs, weapons, or other prohibited items, but they also show a good bit of nudity. This might already seem like a bit of a sketchy reason to reject an iOS game -- there's really nothing explicit or suggestive about the images -- but it's even more questionable once you actually see the game's super low-res, pixelated graphical style.

A bare breast is essentially a semicircle with a dot on it, and good luck identifying anything in the mess of pixels that resides down below. To call such a thing "pornographic" is a massive stretch, but rather than fight the decision (which you can't really do anyway), Pope decided to remove the nudity from the game entirely.