Mars After Midnight
I couldn’t imagine working at a shelter. I’ve known people that have. The responsibility of letting the right people in and keeping the wrong people out to make sure that the ones inside feel safe in a world that hasn’t felt safe in a long time… it’s a lot to ask of someone. You see people at their lowest, people with nowhere else to go. You have no budget to help them get what they need, but you do your best. After they leave, you hope they don’t have to come back.
Mars After Midnight isn’t quite that serious, but there is a very real feeling of responsibility when you’re working the door of a community center on Mars in the middle of the night. From Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please, comes another job simulator, but this one is a Playdate exclusive. You are a three-eyed bird creature working at a community center from 1-5:00 a.m. in a building that houses a shipping facility during the day. Each night has its own theme, whether it’s “sad cyclops” (must have one eye, no smiling), or “math Olympics” (potential entrants need to solve a math equation before being allowed in), or even “farty party,” where only the flatulent are permitted entry.
You hear a knock at the door and open the viewing flap with the crank. If the randomly generated visitor on the other side matches that night’s rules? Come on in! If not, you crank the flap closed and wait for another knock. Find someone that matches, and they’ll come in and eat your snacks. Usually, they’ll leave a big mess for you to clean up with your tentacle arms (Octodad vibes), and if they liked the food you’ll get a donation to buy additional food items or different levels.
Fill the room with like-minded individuals and the meeting will commence, after which you’ll clean up the snack table, take some donations, and head home to sleep the day away before coming back the next night. There’s not a ton of different levels, but each one is unique, and the “feel” of the crank in particular is spot-on. Also, these alien designs are terrific, really showing how far you can push a 1-bit art style on a non-backlit screen.
It’s safe to say this is the most-hyped Playdate game of all time. It’s had a “Coming Soon” banner on Catalog basically since Catalog debuted in March of 2023 – nearly a full year. And it was only $6 when it finally did launch, which was a pleasant surprise. When the guy that made Return of the Obra Dinn wants to make a game exclusively for your tiny yellow machine, I was expecting it to cost AT LEAST $10. But Playdate devs aren’t here to make the maximum amount of money with the minimum amount of effort. They and I are here because the Playdate excites in a way that many other platforms do not. And it’s not just the crank – there’s a punk rock feel with the whole thing, from the development tools being free and highly accessible, to the community being incredibly supportive, to the publishing freedom where anyone can put their game on Itch.io and it’s so easy to sideload, to the system itself being so portable and relatively affordable.
Mars After Midnight is not a huge, sprawling game. It takes just a few aspects of a very specific, important job and makes it feel good to play. It looks good, it sounds good (those synthesized alien speech noises!), it feels good, and it shows what is possible within limitations. It’s going to be amazing to see what comes next.
(Buy on Catalog.)