Playful Date

This is a slightly odd post for this blog, but I wanted to note that earlier this year I got a Playdate handheld console and I've really been loving it. It's a unique piece of hardware from Teenage Engineering and Panic. The design feels a bit like an original Game Boy, with a monochrome screen, D-Pad and two action buttons, but the most notable twist (heh) is the addition of a pull-out crank, which is a great nod to the analog design that Teenage Engineering is best-known for.

As part of buying a Playdate, you get free access to "Season One", with two free games released every week for twelve weeks for a total of 24 games. I'll chat more about these below. Games are delivered over WiFi, but other than that and a handful of leaderboards this is an entirely offline device. They recently released "Season Two" that you can buy, and there's also a curated game store where you can buy games (generally ranging from around $1 to $12), as well as side-load games you purchase or download for free off sites like itch.io.

One of the things I like best about the Playdate is that it is not backlit and it looks best when played in natural sunlight. This is the opposite of how I normally feel about video games: I'm usually playing on my PC, or occasionally on my PlayStation, which feels great if it's a dark winter night or a drizzly weekend afternoon, but I feel bad about being glued to my screen when it's beautiful outside. With the Playdate, though, I love sitting out on the balcony or lying on a sun-drenched couch and gaming for a bit. It's really been a perfect summertime gaming system.

I've had the Playdate for several months now, but had fallen pretty far behind on the weekly releases of Season One, and just finished trying the last couple of games today. I really love the variety: different genres, levels of polish, length. Some are pretty basic tech demos, others look like they'd be at home on a (grayscale) Switch. There are a bunch of different action games, puzzle games, music games, some RPG-adjacent games, and some that defy a genre label. My personal favorites include:

Casual Birder. This was one of the first games I played, and I still haven't finished it, but it's really fun. It reminds me a lot of Earthbound / Mother. Kind of a top-down RPG-esque view, but no combat. Simple conversations, item collection, puzzle-solving, with a cute story.

Saturday Edition. My favorite game of the collection. I'm reluctant to write too much about it since it was such a fun experience to uncover; it felt a little like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, but more of a drama than a comedy.

Sasquatchers. Another RPG-ish game, you lead a team of cryptid hunters trying to capture photos and videos of various elusive creatures: the Sasquatch, Chupacabra, Swamp Creature, and more. This is kind of my holy grail of a game that uses RPG systems without any combat.

Pick Pack Pup. Really fun and cute and surprisingly varied matching game - I think like Bejewelled or Candy Crush maybe, though I'm not very familiar with the genre. You generally need to line up certain types of products in order to collect and ship them, which earns you money, but there are a lot of creative challenges across the various missions. It has a much stronger story than you would expect from a game like this!

Those are my faves, but there are several others I enjoyed a lot. Some games just weren't for me, and that's fine! That was a fun thing about getting 24 games, you just kind of expect that you won't love all of them.

I've already picked up a couple (literally two) of the Catalog games, I'm looking forward to checking those out. I'm also intrigued by Season Two, which apparently includes baffling video content in addition to more good games.

Oh, I should also mention that there's a proper development kit for the Playdate - actually, multiple kits, including a low-level C API (and apparently bindings from other languages that can cross-compile to C), a Lua API, and an integrated editor called Pulp that you can use for RPG Maker-style games. There's a simulator and you can side-load binaries to the Playdate, and you can share games any way you want, including releasing for free on your site or (if approved) selling on the Catalog. I haven't personally tried out the dev kit, but I think it's amazing that there's such a sizeable and passionate developer community around an indie project like this.

I received this Playdate as a gift, but I think I would have been happy buying it for all the entertainment I've gotten from it. Like I said before, it occupies a different niche from the games I'd play on my PC or PlayStation, or even from mobile games. It's been a fun summertime companion, and I feel like I'll be cranking it for years to come.