#playdate roundup

[miloscat]

[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).

[miloscat]

[Review] Playdate roundup 4

Wrapping up Season One.

Snak

A novel twist on the classic Snake. Not only does the food try to take a bite out of you, but you can also jump over your body! Apples that latch onto your snakey form (it starts very long, to make jumping more immediately valuable) start travelling up and if they reach your head, you lose. But you can also eat them off of yourself if your jump lands on the part of you that they're attached to. It's a little tricky to explain but intuitive and very fun to play around with. As you play, you unlock new modes that make your snake faster and faster, making for some frantic arcade action. It's designed as a pick up and play title that you can return to at any time, and it's great for those quick bursts.

Sasquatchers

Made by Telltale veterans, this miniature turn-based tactics game namedrops Advance Wars, and has you use that framework to hunt cryptids, not for violence (although they won’t hesitate to harm you) but to capture footage and photos of them to earn money from online views. Your crew of documentarians have different skills and specialisations for lighting up terrain, manipulating monsters, and maximising likes on your pictures. Snapping shots or video moves you from the grid to a first person view rotated with the crank, to get the best angles on the beasties. It’s very clever and although brief has a good handful of different creatures whose behaviours and special attacks you must contend with.

Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke

A tongue in cheek spinoff of sorts from Campo Santo’s Firewatch, this fast paced arcadey platformer isn’t exactly an auto scroller, but an advancing wall of fire behind you means you can’t dawdle. Your ranger character has to survive the hazards of the forest while rescuing kid scouts and nabbing collectibles. With the help of his trusty shovel he can bounce like Scrooge McDuck, dig up goodies, and knock down rocks and trees on his way to the rescue helicopter at the end of each randomly generated stage. The crank is used to pull kids out of wells and in menus, where you can look at posters unlocked by finding jiggies that reveal a cartoonish sinister side to Byrnes. The action is solid and the pixel art impeccable.

Battleship Godios

A horizontal shmup with two interesting gimmicks: you have a limited number of bouncing bullets which must be re-collected before you fire them off again, and you can spin the crank to reverse time. Using your limited resources within cramped spaces, you have to gradually break the parts of enemy battleships to rebound your projectiles inside them and finish them off. Self-described as “a game with a high level of difficulty and trial & error gameplay that makes retrying inevitable”; I think it would work better (for me at least), without the life system where dying (which happens easily from collisions with other ships) takes away lives even if you reverse time, and you have to start over from the beginning of the game. It could have kept the difficulty and the novel mechanics without being as punishing as this. As it is, not my cup of tea.

b360

One of Panic’s own games for their system, this is a novel take on your classic brick breaking paddle game, but using the Playdate’s crank to spin the paddle in a circle while you bounce a ball to hit blocks in the centre. There’s a campaign of 100 levels with occasional sci-fi interstitials. Each set of 10 will generally introduce a new gimmick or riff on a theme, although sometimes the theme is “be ridiculously precise with your shot” which I found frustrating. Each of the four screen borders has a wall to block one bounce which helps but it still gets tough. Thankfully if you lose all your lives you can start at the same level you were on. So I had moments of struggle but I still saw it all the way through and had a decent time.

Ratcheteer

A mini Zelda-like adventure, in fact I'd say a pitch-perfect homage to Link's Awakening, while leaning more into puzzles than combat. The sci-fi setting is interesting, with your character maintaining the cryogenic facilities for a humanity who is awaiting the end of a long winter caused by a comet impact. But tensions with the surface-dwellers and a mysterious race of aliens spark a little adventure, where you gather mechanical gizmos and explore the caverns and frozen wastelands to bring peace to a blighted world. The Playdate doesn't have many buttons, which can make swapping between your equipment a little fiddly, especially since you so often need a lantern in the dark spaces. But there's some nice use of the crank: charging your lantern, a spin attack, a drill tool, etc. The world map and dungeons are very compact and cleverly put together with new items opening shortcuts, which makes for satisfying progression. This is a little more substantial than many games in Season One, with my journey nearing four hours, so it's a good closer; maybe even the highlight of the collection! Lovely stuff.

[miloscat]

[Review] Playdate Roundup 3

Part 3 of my Playdate adventures goes through the third quarter of Season 1!

Questy Chess

A quirky chess-themed tactical RPG adventure of sorts. With the framing that you’re playing as a lone pawn resisting a software upgrade in an old computer (complete with vector-like graphics and fake disk access noises), you have to navigate grid maps using chess movement rules, unlocking new pieces to access their abilities, capturing enemy pieces and opening paths forward. There’s a lot of powerups to help you on your way: shields, clones, warps, screen-clearing bombs, and other things that would be unusual in chess. Clearing a level scores you on moves, pieces taken, remaining health, etc.; trying for a good score is a goal you could aim for, since just getting through levels isn’t difficult, unless you make a wrong move and get stuck from progressing the level. It’s short and has just enough cool ideas to sustain it.

Executive Golf DX

A cute golf sidescroller. Over a handful of levels, you hit your golfing ball artillery-style over a procedurally generated array of obstacles and up through the levels of an office building from the basement through accounting to the swanky executive suite… and then down through a neighbouring building (which is much easier thanks to gravity), ending in a subterranean cavern, whereupon your competitor’s tower blasts off like a rocket into a volcano. Pretty cool. Along the way you pick up powerups that can change the trajectory of your next swing, granting it low gravity, stickiness, super bounce, etc. The theme is fun, the graphics well done, and although it can be troublesome to surmount the furniture in your way, the experience overall doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Saturday Edition

A compelling adventure game, with a detective story involving alien abductions. The game establishes upfront that the protagonist visited an alien world and returned to his normal life, which colours a lot of the events as they unfold; John will occasionally reflect on his experience and his knowledge of the race that took him away, comparing it to the disappearances and sightings that he finds himself encountering. It's a fascinating angle for a slow-burn story that gradually ramps up the intrigue until the breathtaking finale. With only a few mundane actions to choose between each day, and items or clues discarded when they have served their purpose in the story, it never gets overwhelming like some adventure games can (and if you get stuck the official walkthrough linked on the game’s catalogue page can point you in the right direction), and the impeccable pixel art and subtle soundscape build a very moody atmosphere. This one's a real gem in the season.

Star Sled

The first game in Season One made within Panic, this is similar to Hyper Meteor in giving you crank control of a space ship. It's a bit more ambitious though, with scrolling arenas, a level-based structure, and use of the B button which changes over the campaign, from a speed boost to a warp to a ramming attack. In each level you use the trail behind your ship to lasso gewgaws like it's Nights' paraloop, while avoiding enemy ships and other obstacles. It's fun, and I particularly liked the missions where you infiltrate huge abstract battleships, plus the vector-like art style is eye-catching. There's even hidden bonus stages to find!

Spellcorked

A newly minted witch has started an online potion shop. Each day in game has you checking your magical email for new orders, consulting the grimoire, and preparing ingredients to the correct specifications via crank-powered minigames. The art is meticulously lovely and figuring out the quirks of the ingredient system is engaging, although it requires some trial and error unless you really squint at the grimoire’s minuscule text hints. The unique dialogue and story emails dry up too quickly so getting to max rank in your customers’ reviews gets grindy, and even the requests and their accompanying flavour text and review text is randomly collated from pre-set phrases so they’re nonsensical and repetitive where they could have told stories about your customers and their habits. I also encountered a lot of buggy and/or laggy animations in this one, but I still had a nice time with the chill vibes and juggling remembering the details of orders with the mechanical demands of preparing them.

Inventory Hero

A frantic action game with the trappings of a goofy RPG. Your adventurer character does their thing idle-style, fighting monsters and such. Your job is to manage their inventory, quickly equipping, consuming, or discarding items that drop into the five slots. It’s constantly easy come, easy go, as your armour degrades and you find gear pieces that make your number go up while guzzling food and potions. Boss fights play with the systems by dropping items at a much higher rate but relying on specific bomb items to progress. While it feels like an adventure, it’s really a simple run-based score game with your level acting as a high score; on my first run I got to the glitch world which endlessly repeats. Lots of fun though.

[miloscat]

[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.