You can only play one of 2024’s best games on a tiny, 1-bit screen

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.”