We love Lucas Pope here at TheGamer, which isn’t a surprise – his games and aren’t just iconic indie gems, but some of the most innovative contemporary titles ever created. His work studies labour, capitalism, 🅰immigration and more, making them not just mechanically innovative and stylistically unique, but interesting studies of modern issues in their own righꦫt.
on the Playdate, a relatively niche piece of hardware. Mars After Midnight, which my colleague Eric Switzer pre𒆙v🗹iewed at PAX West last year, is a fascinating and bizarre game where you run the snack ba▨r at an anger managemen♛t meeting for cyclopes. Also, it’s on Mars.
You decide which Martians are allowed into the meetin﷽g, clean and reset the snack table between uses, and let more cyclopes in to repeat the process. The game is inherently tied to the mechanics of the Playdate, incorporating its mechanical crank at every opportunity. It’s hard to imagine the game will be released꧒ on other platforms, given that it would have to adapt these mechanics in less interesting, more conventional ways.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that Pope was interested in making a game for the Playdate. It’s right up his alley, after all, working within specꦜific constraints to make a small, weird, visually distinctive game with interesting, unique mechanics. I’d go so far as to say I’m glad that he’s experimenting with non-mainstream platforms and that the unique features of the Playdate has inspired him to do something new. Is it a shame that I’d need this niche, $199 handheld console to play his newest project? Yes, but I might be coming around to it because of Mars After Midnight.
The Playdate is an intriguing invention in its own right. It’s a very small handheld that fits in your pocket. It has a D-pad, A and B buttons, and a mechanical crank that 𒉰flips out from the side. It can connect to Wi-Fi, and has a loudspeaker. It also has a beautiful exclusively black and white display that makes it perfect for very styli༺sed pixel games, and it drip feeds you 24 of those games for free over 12 weeks from the day you set it up. There’s also Catalog, the Playdate game store, with quite a lot of games available from developers all over the world.
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I’ve considered buying a Playdate before. Of course I have – I love small indie games with interesting mechanic🐎s, who doesn’t? The games are cheap and usually under $10, and you get a lot of them for free right off the bat. But I also find it difficult to justify paying nearly $200 (a lot of money after conversion to my local currency) for a piece of hardware that runs exclusively small indie games and doesn’t have a huge library of games to choose from just yet.
Mars After Midnight makes me reconsider my reluctance, though. Buying a console for one game is a little silly, but it’s given me a reason to take a closer look at the games that are already available on it, and boy, are there some real gems in there. Maybe Pope’s interest in the platform will draw more developers and turn the Playdate into a bona fide indie game hub, or maybe the novelty will die down within a few years and it’ll become a redundant piece of tech. It’s hard to say, but I’m tempted to throw my hat in the ring now and start using the product while it’s still early days, because Mars After Midnight pro🅷ves there’s plenty of potential in small things.
Gamers Are Getting A Little Too Worked Up Over That🃏 One Oscars Speech
Game🍨rs are slighted by an Oscar winner who took ♌a light jab at video games in his award speech.
