Playdate Season 2 full review – the best games on the weirdest console

The black and white portable console with a hand crank as a controller has completed its second season and the games have proven just as odd as the hardware.

The Playdate handheld, with its perfectly weighted crank and immaculate hardware design has been out for just over three years, and while it hasn’t quite set the world on fire it definitely has plenty of devotees.

At launch it came with a ‘season’ of 24 games that arrived as a drip feed of two per week, and made for a delightful introduction to the system, even if we never found ourselves playing any of them after the first few weeks.

Season 2 is just over half the size, bringing you 12 games – along with Blippo+ which is more of an interesting curio than a game. Once again, the variety really impresses, with original and highly unusual games that are built for a system with significant and quite deliberate limitations. It’s fascinating to see how developers adapt, and this season comes with some real highlights.

Week 1

Blippo+

As openers go, they don’t get much braver than Blippo+, which isn’t a game at all. It’s a set of video streams supposedly from the planet Blipp, showcasing bizarre trashy cable TV type content of the sort that used to populate daytime telly in America in the 80s. It takes a while for streams to load on the Playdate, but the slightly grainy content somehow really suits the tiny device. Quite what it’s attempting to convey we have to concede we never really figured out, although there are some common themes you start picking up as you watch more of its abject weirdery.

Fulcrum Defender

Engineered around aiming using the crank, Fulcrum Defender is a circular and completely manual tower defence game from Subset Games, makers of FTL and Into The Breach. Unusually, you have to prevent various shapes, that fly in from the screen edges, from reaching the core in the middle. Enemies employ different flight paths and tactics to avoid your defensive fire, while your advantage comes from power-ups and special weapons, in a fast-paced and precise shooter whose trance beats help augment the sense of being in the zone.

Dig! Dig! Dino!

One of the most substantial of season 2’s games, this has you playing palaeontologist, excavating dig sites in search of dinosaur bones and lore-conferring alien artefacts. Its clever use of black and white textures does a great job of representing the different strata you dig through, while upgrading everything from your shovel to bone-detecting sonar proves pleasantly addictive. An involving game that proves hard to put down once you’re in the swing.

Week 2

Wheelsprung

Riding Wheelsprung’s tiny trials bike is an exercise in balance, throttle control, and braking to avoid obstacles and ensure you don’t hit the ground with enough force to destroy your bike. Its 34 side-scrolling tracks swiftly become extremely challenging, with each requiring multiple attempts even to figure out which way to go and what approach you should take, let alone actually reaching the end. Deep, subtle, and physics-based, it demands dedication to reveal its charms.

The Whiteout

After an icy but unspecified cataclysm that’s wiped out human civilisation, you trudge around its wreckage trying to eke out an existence scavenging through the snowy debris. As usual, the real horrors are other people, some of whom can be friendly but are often horribly bad news. Its melancholy tone and world-building, your character’s reminiscences overlaid on your exploration, are punctuated by inventory puzzles and moments of savagery perpetrated by fellow survivors. Your ultra-slow walking pace and continual backtracking are in keeping with the mise en scène but can grate.

Week 3

CatchaDiablos

This crank-orientated animal catching game has you controlling a cat with a hoop. Your job is to swing it over an unwary creature and then rapidly turn the crank to encircle it, adding it to your inventory, and capturing multiple enemies if you time it right. Its mechanics and locomotion are unlike anything you’re likely to have played before and take some getting used to, giving seasoned gamers a brief glimpse of what it must be like for non-gamers to pick up a controller for the first time.

Shadowgate PD

An accurate recreation of the 1987 game, Shadowgate, complete with single channel audio tunes and monochrome still frame graphics, played by selecting an action from a list, then moving the cursor to apply it to something on screen. It’s an incredibly clunky control scheme, but it just about gets the job done. Even overlooking the inherent unwieldiness, it’s almost unbelievably difficult, with obtuse puzzles that are seemingly immune to logic and instant death around every corner. By today’s standards it’s all but impossible and in the years before internet walkthroughs it’s astounding that anyone could have worked out how to complete it.

Week 4

Long Puppy

You’re an extendable dachshund, the crank stretching your sausage dog body to try and reach pieces of food, each of which makes you longer, a bit like old classic, Snake. The lengthier you get, the better your reach, letting you access previously inaccessible areas, then at the end of each level you crank out a dog egg whose size depends on how much you’ve managed to eat during your escapades. It’s quite the oddity, if not the most compelling of this season’s titles.

Otto’s Galactic Groove

Otto’s Galactic Groove is a funky rhythm action game with the messy hip-hop spirit of Jet Set Radio, blended with the otherworldliness of Space Channel 5. Its story is purposely bizarre, even if its rhythm action is more or less as you’d expect, apart from a reliance on the crank to target the notes you tap. You’ll also need to use it to hold sustained notes, which slope up and down, and in Extreme difficulty turn into improbable zig-zags that you’ll need to track at speed. It features admirably eclectic musical styles, and you can really hear when you miss a beat.

Week 5

Black Hole Havoc

To destroy the black holes threatening your planet you need to launch black holes of identical size to cancel them out. Adjust the diameter of each hole using the crank, aim and fire, the difference between the size of the one you shoot and the one you hit getting deducted from your health bar. You’ll also need to avoid space tourists, amongst other obstacles, by bouncing black holes off the wall to target their harder to reach counterparts, in levels that sadly aren’t all that much fun.

Taria & Como

This season’s undoubted star is Taria & Cosmo, a 2D side-scrolling puzzle platform adventure about a girl and her grapple hook robot, which she can fire out and stick onto certain surfaces, letting her swing or suspend herself from them. You use the crank to aim the grapple, then once attached, lengthen and shorten the rope, letting you perform increasingly dazzling acrobatic moves as you get used to the unusual feel of traversal. Despite the small screen some of your antics feel elegant – majestic even – and its narrative is a searing satire of cold-hearted corporate control and the American medical system.

Week 6

Tiny Turnip

You’re a small, two-armed turnip, exploring a sizeable map by climbing your way around it, the crank swinging one arm, then the other, as you grip and release. New skills you unlock open up new parts of the map, Metroidvania style, and just getting around is enough of a test on its own until you get the hang of it. You’ll soon find yourself becoming more proficient, which is just as well given the lifts, pinball-style plungers, and rows of spikes you’ll need to navigate as you explore, making frequent use of the map.

Chance’s Lucky Escape

Chance the dog’s point ‘n’ click adventure is just under an hour’s worth of novelty grade good luck/bad luck scenarios, that see its law-breaking canine anti-hero alternately tormented and rewarded by fate. Starting with a flat tyre and a lost mobile, that prevent him warning his gangster pals of their imminent arrest, he immediately falls down a manhole into the sewer, and that’s just the start of his mini-calamities. Set in a city populated by talking dogs, cats and duck-billed platypuses, it makes good use not only of the crank, but also the Playdate’s microphone and accelerometer.

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