In late October of 2022, I received my PlayDate, which I had preordered over a year earlier. The PlayDate is a very small, black and white indie handheld console. It mostly looks like a small Game Boy, with it’s D-pad and two face buttons, but it has a unique control twist. On the side is a crank that you can turn to do different actions in games. I was pretty excited for it, it seemed like a very unique new thing. But after a few weeks of goofing off with the included games, I kind of just put it down and forgot about it.

Fast forward to 2024, and there’s been a number of changes to the platform. The biggest of which is Catalog, a storefront on the handheld itself as well as on their website. Before this, if you wanted to add games to your PlayDate, you had to side load them after buying them off of other services, like itch.io. Now, you have an actual storefront with games to buy, most of which are very cheap. Recently, Lucas Pope of Papers Please fame released his new game as a PlayDate exclusive on Catalog. It’s called Mars After Midnight and it’s the reason I finally picked the handheld up again.

Mars After Midnight has a lot in common with Papers Please, although much sillier. Where Papers Please is about looking over people’s information to decide if they can enter your country, Mars After Midnight is about looking over various Martians to see if they fit the group therapy sessions that you are holding. It’s very goofy, but also very charming.

The gameplay loop is simple but effective. First, you decide which therapy session you’re doing. These are on tapes that you put inside your robot friend. Then, you have to let everyone know about the sessions, so you go to a map and choose which regions to advertise. The map shows where the Martians that fit the session live, so just advertise there. Then, you choose snacks. And finally, you screen the people who come to the sessions to see if they fit what you’re looking for.

Most of the game is spent in the screening session. You sit behind a window and wait for a knock. Turning the PlayDate’s crank will open the window, allowing you to see who has shown up. From there, you check them out. As an example, one of the therapy sessions is for Martians who fart. So, you’ll open the window, listen for a fart, and if you hear one, you let them in. If you don’t, you crank the window back down and wait for the next. I won’t spoil any other themes, but there’s a lot of very creative things for you to look out for.

When a Martian is let in, they will then go and eat the snacks you’ve provided. If they like the snacks, they’ll leave a tip, but they almost always leave the table a mess. Using the D-pad to move your character’s tentacles (did I mention you’re playing a squid-like alien?), you’ll pick everything up and then use the crank to sweep off the table. Then, you’ll set everything back to they’re assigned spots and you’re good to go back to screening.

Once eight Martians have been allowed inside, the session will start. You don’t really do anything for these, just wait for it to end. Afterwards, everyone will leave and give you money if the session helped them, which basically just means you selected the right Martians. From there, you’ll then choose another theme and go through the whole thing again. As you do this, the number of Martians that need help goes down, eventually resulting in you helping everyone. It’s a very satisfying loop that had me playing through  the whole thing in just a couple play sessions.

The game has a lot of charm, which really elevates the experience. The Martians are all crazy looking and never stopped being fun to encounter. They also talk in gibberish, but you’re able to pause the game and look up what each noise they make means. While the game itself is fun enough on its own, the personality makes it a must play for me.

It’s not perfect, however. The game is very easy. The only real way to lose would be to run out of money, but it’s so easy to identify which snacks will get you tips and which Martians fit the themes that I was never even close to running out of money. I’m not normally someone who complains too much about difficulty in games, but this is a game that would definitely benefit from some higher stakes.

Mars After Midnight isn’t just a good game though, it’s also the thing that got me to really check out what the PlayDate has to offer in 2024. I think I might finally really understand it now. I picked up a couple more games, What The Crow and Reel Fishing, and have been having a really good time with both. While the PlayDate will never be one of the big video game platforms, it’s a great thing to keep in your pocket and play some neat little experiences. I’m really happy that I have one and look forward to what’s next for it.

If you don’t already have a PlayDate, I don’t know that Mars After Midnight will be enough to convince you to pick one up. But if you’re like me, and picked one up when they were brand new and are looking to actually use it for something, this is an absolute must play. And from what I’ve seen, the PlayDate itself is only going to get better.