[Review] Playdate Roundup 2
Here's part 2 of my casual exploration of the Playdate, continuing Season 1 in order for now.
Flipper Lifter
A cute arcade experience, where the crank controls a lift picking up and dropping off penguins. It gets harder to shift it upwards the more you’re carrying, and don’t take too long or your passengers get fed up and leave, costing you time and star points. Progressing adds new floors to your current structure, while accumulating stars unlocks new maps with fun themes and wrinkles like parallel tracks to interchange between, or a hazardous condor. A decent little timewaster.
Echoic Memory
This aural challenge has you repairing “smart speakers” by listening carefully to EDM loops, then matching them to options arrayed on a board. These can trick you by being quite similar, and their faint and scratchy beats must be tuned into like finding a radio signal via the crank. The story is a bit on the nose and takes a bit to get going; it was starting to get intriguing when I lost patience with the high difficulty.
Omaze
An interesting minimalist puzzle-ish game where you move an orb around a sequence of interlinked circles using the crank. The mix of action and precision can make it very difficult as you progress, combined with the fact that I never managed to internalise which crank direction I needed to turn when swapping circles, meant I started getting fed up past the halfway mark.
Demon Quest ‘85
A short adventure game of sorts, where you summon demons in order to solve trivial, even cliche, high school problems. Your choices are few but the narrative can branch depending on whether you, say, ask for help finding a lost notebook or teaching a friend French. Picking out clues from the book of demonology isn’t hard, it’s more about making choices and following the story, visual novel style. You end up influencing events in Hell more than expected, and there’s humour in juxtaposing the high-minded demonic speeches with the prosaic teenage concerns, plus the art is nice.
Hyper Meteor
A slick arcade game riffing on the classic Asteroids, but with a cool twist: you have no weapons, so you must ram your ship into white-coloured targets while black-coloured parts will destroy you. For the ordinary space rocks this means timing your thrust around their spinning momentum, but later enemy ships must be manoeuvred around to hit their unarmoured rears or to avoid their projectiles. It’s fun and with a nice pace that’s not too hectic at first, and your ship’s direction is determined by the crank which feels nice and tactile.
Zipper
A stylish isometric tactics/puzzle game. Your lone samurai character has to infiltrate a castle, facing down many swordsmen, ninjas, etc. in a turn-based Rogue fashion where they move when you do. Luckily, you have the ability to “zip”, where you can use as many movement tiles as you want to get the first strike against your foes; any remaining enemies will then use the same number of movements as you did, so you have to be sure to kill them, manoeuvre, or stun them with a blood spray from their companions to keep yourself safe. It’s hard to explain, but fun to figure out, then hard again to really master it against the more complex enemies and formations. I never quite made it to the end; you can learn the layout of the grounds, but the location of the key you need is randomised each run, and it’s so easy to die carelessly, even with the crank feature that forecasts enemy actions. This restarts your run from zero, which can get frustrating, but it’s such a cool idea regardless.
