“PapersPlease uses SDL on Linux, which checks every few seconds if a joystick has been connected.”
The game froze for a second every few seconds because SDL kept polling all 30 input devices for a joystick. Nobody plays a passport stamping game with a gamepad. The fix was a one-byte binary patch that turns the check into a return. The 64-bit Linux build shipped broken, and a customer with strace had to fix it.