Not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I know what Mars After Midnight smells like. I think Mars After Midnight smells like church halls and community centers, which means it smells like hot powder, floor wax, and feet. These are the kind of places that serve many different parts of the community, changing and rearranging as the time dictates. The line dancers arrive at seven and then the book club arrives at nine. Will model railroad enthusiasts remember to turn off and lock?
All of which should tell you that, while Mars After Midnight is a Lucas Pope game, it's a very different kind of Lucas Pope game, as different (if such a thing is possible) as it is familiar. I guess this makes sense. Mars After Midnight is a game made specifically for the Playdate, that fun little handheld with no backlight on the screen and a crank on the side. If ever there was an invitation for the minds behind brilliantly sinister games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers, Please to mix things up, it's this device.
On the surface, at least, there's a bit of Papers, Please, the Pope's totalitarian passport-checking megahit. For quite a while in Mars After Midnight you're guarding a door, making sure only certain people enter. But context is everything, and context here is, well, hot powder, floor and foot wax. You are guarding the entrance to a community center: a shipping and receiving center during the day and a community support center at night. Each night you lead a different support group and make sure only the right people attend.
At the door level, this means using the crank to open and close a small hatch in the door to monitor people as they approach. If you're running Cyclops Anger Management, you're counting eyes, which can be a surprisingly delicate task on Mars, with all these different aliens running around. If you're hosting the Blink-Free Roundtable, you need to people watch to make sure you only let in people who never seem to need to close their eyes. There is a lovely variety though. To a shuddering support group, I had to honk and see who would react. You can guess what he was looking for before the Farty Party.
But the door is only one part. This is a cheerful management and puzzle game that expands in several directions. You choose a support group each night, determine what areas you need to advertise in so the right people know about it, buy food you think people will like, and then run everything except the group itself. Watch the door. Let the right people in. Clean the food station. Make sure everyone is happy when they leave.
Cash flows through the system, controlling how much you can advertise and what kind of food you can buy, as well as the upgrades you can get from a street vendor. These may be new types of support groups or sophisticated items like a device that allowed me to understand several Martian languages. It is bland, however, a game of silly pieces that Pope created in hopes of entertaining his children. Keep the food table clean, move things with your tentacles and clean up crumbs with a special device. Watch whoever walks through the door. Observe the people and things that make them who they are. Try to anticipate their needs and keep them happy.
I love all this, and for several reasons. I love that Playdate means we get to see a softer, sillier side of Pope – they're his concerns to a certain extent, but used for a very different purpose. And I also love something that reminds me of my favorite science fiction novel and reminds me why it's my favorite.
Frederik Pohl's Gateway may not seem to have much in common with Mars After Midnight: it's a big-budget movie about an asteroid that turns out to be some kind of intergalactic bus terminal for a long-vanished race of superbeings. But what I love about Gateway is its relentless focus on the little human things in life: the struggle to pass time, the junk food, the petty ambitions, and the indignities of a typical day spent in low gravity. Mars After Midnight is like that. It's a colony on Mars, sure, but it's also Farty Party, and there are snacks, and probably paper plates, and faces you haven't seen in a long time.
One last thing. It's community, and that hidden and crucial aspect of community that is the groups, the volunteers, someone to set up the chairs and put everything back under lock and key. When night falls on Mars, it turns out that we have brought all these vital and lovely human things with us. Be careful how you go! Don't trip over the tentacles. And lower the blinds when you are closing?
