Mars After Midnight is a game I have been anticipating to play for around two years now, more specifically after completing another Lucas Pope- and now one of my favorite games ever made Return of the Obra Dinn. While not the only reason, the announcement of Mars After Midnight as a Playdate exclusive of all things, was a big contributor to me buying the console and I don’t think I’m alone with that, as their tweets about the game are noticeably more popular and comments about it riddle the sections of tweets that don’t even mention it.
After the announcement of the release date, around two weeks ago, even after playing through this game, it still doesn’t feel real to finally own it after this long time, so I probably don’t have to describe how high my expectations for this game were.

Did it meet said expectations?
Yes!
Did it exceed them?
No, but that should never be a standard to hold anything on now, should it?

Mars After Midnight is another entry in Lucas Pope’s paperwork series and is (to my knowledge) the first one based around a job that has yet to exist.
You will see yourself as the owner of a Martian-help-center and work at the reception while finding out which Martian, Robot or even Human needs help. The ways of going about this are relatively simple. Some you can deduce, for some you need to use a device and for others both, just know that there are always 6 Martians that need any given kind of help.
After letting someone in, they may eat some refreshments and may leave a mess, which you may have to clean up for the next customer to dabble in said refreshments. After the session is done you get two Mars-Dollars for every right customer. These Mars-Dollars can then be used to advertise, buy food etc. for the next Martians. They can also be spend on items or new treatments, sold by a merchant that shows up every day.

Planning out your next day is always fun, with you looking at the map of your colony, with the living quarters of the six Martians you want to attend being highlighted and picking out where to advertise and which food is most popular at any given place, every day. The only issue I had with this is that it disincentivizes experimenting with new foods, as the cleaning-up process, the only one with a timer, will be different with every item of food. Furthermore the first item of food doesn’t only cover a lot of area, but becomes the easiest to clean up with your dependency on it in the early game.

I’m conflicted on the amount of Martians you have to get right, as 6 is pretty much the perfect amount, if you fail, as you will have more than enough time to deduce what you did wrong, but it does get a bit repetitive if you instantly know what to do and now have to go through a random amount of visitors to pick out the six obvious candidates. This small issue gets heightened by the fact that this game is really easy, and I only had to redo two jobs, because I forgot what reading was; so the fact that six is the perfect amount in those cases didn’t really come up. Even if you fail the punishments are relatively insignificant as you get paid more than enough, for those 2 Mars-Dollars not to matter, if you only miss a few.

As I already mentioned, there aren’t that many ways of finding out which Martian needs a given treatment, but don’t worry, there is enough variation in these ways of deduction for this to never get repetitive, over it’s relatively short runtime of ~3 hours. The gadgets especially, even with them being simple in concept, were fun to mess around with, just to see the reactions of the Martians you try them on, which is even incentivized by the reactions acting as a collectible, with new phrases being registered in the blab-o-dex, a sort of encyclopedia of the Martian language.

Now I’ve tried to stay spoiler-free up until now, but there is one small gripe I had with the game which I cannot talk about without spoiling something that happens at around 2/3rds through the game, so I will write my conclusion here while everything after may be a spoiler.
Mars After Midnight is probably not worth you buying a Playdate, solely to play it, for, even with it being a quality, although simple game. If you are on the fence of buying one anyways, with this game just being a big contributor to why, then there probably is no better time than now, as they have now ended the preorder structure, with me waiting for around a year for mine to arrive in September and there currently being a sale on their online storefront going on; some of my recommendations of other games on Playdate to keep an eye on are Resonant Tale and Sparrow Solitaire

The spoiler(-y) section will begin here.

As I already mentioned something happens in Mars After Midnight at around the 2-hour mark, being that you will leave your colony and go to the people’s colony, which primarily serves as a way for there to be more visual variety. My problem with this comes from the brevity of time you spend there, as the previous colony had 78 Martians to provide help for, while this one has only 24, which also means it is way smaller, which then means even less variety in the food items to use and such. I also found the ways to deduce way easier in this section than some of the more difficult ones of the first colony.