You would honestly be surprised at the level of development there’s been on the Playdate. After the numerous failures of niche appeal consoles to gain any kind of traction the Playdate seems to be going strong, with a good number of new titles making their debut on it regularly. Whilst I can’t say I’m staying on top of them myself the gaming media has done a good job of making me aware of some bizarrely interesting titles like Root Bear and Touch Egg, both of which might eventually get a review (probably all bundled together).
Mars after Midnight though is a game I’ve been tracking ever since the Playdate was originally announced and, I’ll admit, no small part of my reasoning when it came time to purchase one. Whilst I might’ve failed miserably at his last title, Return of the Obra Dinn, I still love his approach to game development and wanted to see what he made of the platform. Suffice to say the game is very much in his trademark style which has been simplified and adapted to suit the platform. It does suffer from somewhat repetitive gameplay though, making it more of a small bites adventure than something you might sit down and play through in one sitting.
You are…let’s say one of many martians who call Mars home and live in the Off-Colony settlement. With your robot sidekick you run a variety of activities out of a local community center with the hopes of helping out all the martians on this planet with their various problems. It’s not a simple job either as it seems many in the martian off-colony settlement will take any chance to come through your door and eat all your refreshments before gatecrashing your sessions. So it’s up to you to keep the riff-raff out, make sure the table is well stocked and that those you want to help find their way to your classes. All in the hopes that you one day might be able to get your own ticket off the settlement.
As you’d expect from a Lucas Pope game it’s done with a deep love for pixel art, making the most of the limited amount of screen space that the Playdate provides. This also extends to the sound design as well, with liberal use of a simplistic sound engine to develop a comprehensive audio experience encompassing foley, music and even the character’s voices. If it wasn’t for how smooth the animations were you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a found game that never saw the light of day on an older Gameboy platform made by a AAA developer, it’s just that well done.
The core game loop mimics that of Papers, Please putting you in charge of the front door to a community center. Your job is to ensure that aliens that will actually be helped by the session you’re running that day make it in whilst all others are sent packing. This usually takes the form of identifying some feature on the alien or using a provided accessory to figure something out about them. Then, should they be successful, they’re walked past the refreshment table. Should they like it they’ll take something from it, (usually) mess it up then leave you a couple off-colony credits for your trouble. You then have to reset the refreshment table and start the cycle all over again. At the end of each session you’ll receive a couple credits per helped alien and then start it all over again.
The concept is relatively simple but I will admit that I didn’t actually understand what the hell was going on for the first few sessions. I seemingly didn’t manage to capture as many aliens who I needed to help as I should have and it always seemed hit or miss as to who liked what refreshments. Of course this was me missing some of the game’s mechanics which actually show you this in the map when you’re selecting the session which, once I figured that out, made everything a lot easier. It mostly became an exercise in turning the crank, somewhat literally, to get through all the various sessions and cleaning up the few aliens I didn’t manage to catch initially.
This is where the game starts to get really repetitive though as whilst you’re given a number of different mechanics by which to sort through the aliens, some of which are absolutely hilarious to use, it’s still basically the same game numerous times over. You’ll still have to clear the table basically every time before going back to the door and repeating the same actions again and again. You can get through a full session in about 10 minutes or so, making it rather ideal to be picked up when you’ve got a moment to spare, but given the lack of variety in the game play I can’t say I was enthused to do so terribly often.
Whilst it’s light on narrative the game still managed to round everything out with a good ending. There’s also some great little bits of story scattered throughout but again nothing that I’d really call an overarching narrative. I don’t think the Playdate is a platform for a deep narrative game either, although I’d love to be corrected on that one.
Mars after Midnight stands out on the Playdate as one of its flagship titles, showing that you can make something pretty darn great with not too much at all. The craftsmanship of the game is top notch, reflecting Lucas Pope’s ability in using limitations to his advantage. The only downside comes from the repetitive nature of the core game loop, something that becomes apparent when you try to play this game for long stretches of time. Other than that though it hit the mark in terms of expectations and hopefully inspires others to make similar kinds of experiences on the platform.
Rating: 8.25/10
Mars after Midnight is available exclusively on the Playdate right now for $6. Total play time was approximately 3 hours.
