[Review] Playdate Roundup 1
Here's the first in what I plan to make a semi-regular review series. Playdate games are small but sweet, and I will inevitably play some that I don't always want to finish, so I plan to bundle some mini-reviews together into a roundup with no set schedule or expectations. Yippee! In this instalment, I start working through the included games in Season 1.
Casual Birder
A cute RPG about taking photos of birds, despite your character having no skills or knowledge in the area. The writing and character designs are fun, and I like the mechanic of moving your camera frame around the screen to capture the perfect bird photo (or even a barely legible one), filling out a birddex with uninformed but enthusiastic descriptions. The fiddliness of the inventory and adventure game style puzzles I was less thrilled with. The Playdate's unique crank mechanism is used to focus the camera, which works OK although it's rarely intuitive how you need to change it, so there's some trial and error. I played for an hour or so but got stuck trying to progress.
Whitewater Wipeout
An arcadey score-chasing game that acts as a tech demo for the Playdate crank (not to mention its one-colour screen thanks to a heavy use of dithering techniques), making it a good choice for week one. The combination of fast and slow movement that the analogue crank affords works well with this surfing simulation, and it was a decent showpiece on Christmas Day when I unwrapped the device, but it didn't hold my attention too long. A brief note that the weekly trickle of games via the Season format isn't really to my taste; I don't like being dictated what to play via a slow drip feed, which is why it's taken me until now to go back and plough through Season 1's games.
Boogie Loops
Case in point. Rather than a game per se, this is a music creation tool; it shows that the Playdate is capable of more than "just" games, but this kind of creativity app is always going to be niche or divisive. I could tell after a few minutes this wasn't for me, so then I only have one game to play for a whole week if I'm following the Season's schedule? Hmm. Anyway, the dancing characters are cute.
Crankin's Time Travel Adventure
A sort of puzzle game entirely controlled with the crank, which advances your robot character along a set path with the speed that you turn it. The trick is aligning his actions to the hazards coming his way—including cranking backwards to reverse his movements—so he dodges them all Mr. Magoo-style. There's some comedy to this and the animations, but it wears off quickly as the levels get more demanding, requiring trial-and-error with great precision, so I got fed up with it at a certain point.
Pick Pack Pup
It's the first game I played all the way through! A match-3 puzzle game of sorts, you have to match items to ship them from an Amazon-like warehouse. Making a match forms a box which can block further matches, while you're trying to make more boxes to ship them all at once for a combo, so there's some strategy to it. The story mode does a great job varying the parameters and objectives in each level within the basic framework, changing your playstyle from getting combos to careful placement to deliberately trashing objects, etc. Between levels is a little story about your eager (and adorable) pup working in a dystopian corporate environment, with plenty of satire delivered via memos and cute crank-controlled comic segments. Supplementing the 30-stage campaign are replayable modes with different degrees of pressure to them. Lovely stuff.
Lost Your Marbles
Billed as a visual novel, this cute adventure has crank-controlled gameplay segments where you rotate a map to roll a marble around an obstacle course to hit targets that represent choices for your character Prota to make, and consequently affect the path the story takes. Her small community is very wholesome but the humour has some bite to it too, with fun silly characters to meet. The marble bits can be a bit finicky but switching up the themes and layouts kept them engaging, and the game has ten endings so I found it better to try for the best outcome but go along with whatever comes (I only did one playthrough, as well). It felt a little wordy to me, but it is a visual novel after all, and you can always skip dialogue sections (vital for subsequent runs).
