Mars After Midnight review: Become a bouncer and therapist at the end of the universe

With a user base barely touching 70,000, though, the €200 Playdate remains a curiosity, a rounding error in comparison to the millions of consoles flogged monthly by Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. Few high-profile developers have jumped on board, which makes the Playdate debut of Lucas Pope a noteworthy event.

Pope impressed in 2013 with politically charged breakout hit Papers, Please before dazzling us with marvellous detective story Return of The Obra Dinn in 2019. Mars After Midnight shares some DNA with both those games, not least their evocative monochrome aesthetic – ideally suited to the low resolution of the Playdate.

The premise is even more surreal than the typically quirky Pope set-up – so buckle up for some silly humour and freaky characters. You’re a tentacled alien who runs a suite of support groups on the Red Planet for depressed or lonely Martians. Every night in the wee hours, you organise a get-together targeting a specific issue. But these aren’t your usual problems – you’re trying to help the locals who bond over excessive flatulence, arithmetical obsession, or shyness, for instance.

More pertinently, this being Mars, you’re not dealing with mere humans but instead a startling range of humanoid-adjacent creatures sporting everything from five eyes to giant teeth to horns.

You act both as both bouncer and host, ensuring the right grouping of guests gather depending on the session in question. You use your intuition, observation and a variety of instruments to select who to admit.

First, you cautiously crank open the door’s eye slot to survey each visitor who knocks. Then you marvel at the sheer breadth and grotesque nature of Pope’s procedurally generated menagerie of callers. You might listen to their chatter – helpfully translated by the in-game “Blab-o-dex” – or toot an airhorn to, for example, weed out the non-shy.

Finally, you apply your judgment by admitting them or rejecting them.

Pope incorporates a series of other parameters – where you advertise that night’s meeting, what snacks you offer and which perks you buy from a travelling salesman. But the core of the game hinges on the kooky screening process and how you maximise the popularity of each night’s event. During the gatherings, you can’t witness the baring of souls or do any more than clean the snack stand.

It’s a quite a Zen process, suited to 10 minutes’ play here and there. Mars Over Midnight has no “win” state, nor hidden depth much beyond the loop of meeting after meeting. Players of a twitchy disposition may even find it – gasp! – boring.

Yet Pope’s skill is to blend this brief gameplay loop into something compelling. He fuses weird art, earworm chiptunes and the simple joy of pleasing people – well, oddball aliens at least – into an unorthodox game of social deduction.