You can only play one of 2024’s best games on a tiny, 1-bit screen
30.03.2024 - 11:07
/ digitaltrends.com
/ Tomas Franzese
/ You Can
It’s only March and 2024 is already full of bold, big-budget games like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. But one of my favorite games of 2024 isn’t available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, or even Nintendo Switch. It’s Mars After Midnight, a game from Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn developer Lucas Pope. The only place you can play it? On the Playdate, Panic’s quirky little 1-bit handheld with a crank.
Mars After Midnight is a more lighthearted game than Pope’s previous work. It follows an alien who dreams of coming to Earth and works to achieve that goal with his robot companion by moderating and serving as the bouncer for community events each night on Mars. Using the Playdate’s limited buttons and a crank, players must vet every alien creature that comes up to the door before deciding whether or not to let them in while also cleaning up after the aliens who eat the offered refreshments.
Mars After Midnight — Launch Trailer
By using every inch of the Playdate’s display and almost all of the buttons on this small handheld,Mars After Midnight is a master class in getting the most out of the platform a game is made for. It’s innovative in that respect, and as I learned from speaking with Pope, that creativity comes from the constraints of making a game for Playdate. The platform forged a diamond under pressure.
1-bit wonder
Released in 2022, the Playdate is a handheld that harks back to the days of the Game Boy. It sports a small 1-bit display with no backlight and a crank on its side. The unique aspects of the device have attracted many developers to make games for the handheld, Pope included. “This is a weird way to play a game, but there’s so much cool stuff you can do with it,” Pope tells Digital Trends. “Coming off Obra Dinn, I was really burnt out, but something like Playdate seemed like a nice little playground to mess around in.”
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When you’re really limited by what you can do, you have to think about problems that we don’t think about anymore.
Pope’s 2018 hit Return of the Obra Dinn is a first-person puzzle adventure game where players have to deduce how all the crew members on the titular ship died. It’s a remarkable game, but its 1-bit art style also helped it stand out. Pope tells me his infatuation with 1-bit visuals comes from his childhood days of playing with a Macintosh Plus, which fostered an appreciation of the unique visual design challenges. That interest provided the bridge from making Obra Dinn to wanting to create something for the