Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
For Lucas Pope, Mars After Midnight began with the faces. Hundreds of procedurally generated alien smirks and stares, some of them accompanied by a horn or half a dozen eyes, patiently awaiting your approval. Even without any gameplay, it was good enough for the game designer’s children. “To me that’s when I thought this could work,” he says of his latest title. “Even if I screw up everything from here on, at least my kids will enjoy flipping this window open and seeing what’s there.”
The premise is simple, if zany: you, the player, are working the door at a community centre on Mars. Every night, there are entry requirements for the various help sessions taking place and you must ensure that you let the right Martians in for the right sessions. There are six seats per session, and it’s up to you to fill them. There are also free refreshments (“because there’s no better way to get a big audience”, says Pope), and the Martians are messy eaters, so you need to keep the table they use tidy. Then you choose what the next session will be, and where on the settlement to advertise it with the limited funds you have.
That’s it — there’s no win condition, no fail state, just a constant stream of motley Martians to guide into the right sessions, and a few gadgets, such as X-ray machines, to aid the selection process. “It’s not very challenging,” says Pope. “You can just keep playing and try again.”
Pope has made a name for himself as the designer of idiosyncratic games. In Papers, Please, a “dystopian document thriller”, you play a border guard deciding whom to let into the fictional, eastern-bloc-inspired country of Arstotzka. And Return of the Obra Dinn is a puzzle game set on a merchant vessel that resurfaces after five years of silence with all its crew dead or missing. Both, despite their one-man development team, were lauded for their unusual settings, intricate mechanics and sombre tone.
Pope’s choice of platform for Mars After Midnight marks a departure. While his previous games were first released on PC and Mac, and gradually made available on consoles and mobile devices, it will only be available in one place on release: Playdate. The handheld console made by Panic Inc — publisher of Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game — has sold more than 70,000 units since it launched in 2022. Not bad for a venture that started life as a clock, but still a niche proposition compared to the tens of millions of PlayStation 5s, Xbox Series X/Ss and Nintendo Switches worldwide.
“There are more people who want to play my games than will have a Playdate,” Pope admits. To put it in perspective, Papers, Please has sold about 5mn copies since it debuted a decade ago. But as soon as he saw the Playdate, Pope knew he wanted to make a game for it.
“It’s the kind of designer honeypot that the Wii remote was,” he says. The console measures just 76mm by 74mm, comes with a 400- by 240-pixel, 1-bit screen and has a mechanical crank on the side. Pope found the diminutive display just right for the view you’d get peering through the door of the Martian community centre, and the crank perfect for the feeling of opening it.
The clue is in the name — Playdate’s titles are relatively casual, informal experiences that don’t require your constant and undivided attention. Arisa Sudangnoi, the console’s developer relations lead, describes them as “games you can pause at any moment and then pick back up”, and that’s how Pope sees Mars After Midnight. Not as a 20-hour epic, but as light-hearted fun, with a benevolent protagonist and a mischievous air.
That’s not to say that the game won’t possess Pope’s quirkiness. It’s still, as he puts it, “weird”; there’s the tell-tale fascination with faces familiar to those who pored over passports in Papers, Please, and the distinctive monochrome aesthetic that lent such atmosphere to Obra Dinn. But it is a change of pace. And, thanks to the Playdate, a rather alien one at that.
‘Mars After Midnight’ is available from March 12 on Playdate
