Week 1
Casual Birder – Now this was a surprise. The Playdate always seemed like it would be house very simple games and weird experiments, but this is a full-blown adventure. Well, it's pretty barebones by regular standards, but this feels quite expansive for a Playdate game: it's got a world that's a dozen screens big, lots of dialogue, puzzles that aren't immediately apparent, and optional content, too. Took me a good two or three hours to finish this one and had a great time (the humour isn't really my style, though). Panic really put their best foot forward by leading with this.
Whitewater Wipeout — Gotta admit, this one threw me for a loop: between the unique control scheme, absolutely no instruction and the overall unforgiving nature of the game, I was absolutely baffled trying to work out how to play it. But I stuck with it and eventually got the hang of it, and now I think it is actually really good. The crank really adds a level of precision to navigating, and makes doing those tricks really fun! It also demonstrates of the value of the staggered-release model, in a way: I doubt I would have kept trying to work it out if I had several other games to move on to, but when it was one of two, I was willing to put the time into it. I've periodically gone back to it in the weeks since, and I'm still getting better at it. My high score is 31,000 — I don't know if that's particularly impressive or not, but I'm happy.
Week 2
Crankin's Time Travel Adventure — This is the game that essentially sold me on a Playdate to begin with (what can I say, I'm a big fan of Keita Takahashi), so I was quite pleased to get it so early in the season. It's really simple, mechanically: get Crankin from point A to point B by winding the crank, taking advantage of how going counterclockwise will reverse his animations to escape harm. So boil it down to its essentials and it's just a memorization game. But I had a blast. The design is simple enough, and the stages short enough, that it has a real "just one more level" pull — far too often I'd play a couple levels, put it down, then find myself reaching for the Playdate only a few minutes later. It gets surprisingly difficult at times — some of the later stages get really long, or have really really tight windows of execution — but I did finish it, and with hearts on all the stages, too. Great example of the uniqueness of the console, and the standout game to me (so far).
Boogie Loops — A music editor. I messed around with this for a bit, and it's cute, but I found the interface a little confusing and I'm not really the target audience anyway. Glad it exists, though.
Week 3
Lost Your Marbles — A cross between a visual novel and a marble game, which really just means that there's a framing story and a lot of dialogue surrounding the marble stages. The physics feel a bit weird but the game is pretty fun, and a lot trickier than it seems — getting those Star pods can be tough. It's also bigger than it seems: after I finished it, I immediately started over to see if I could do better, and in doing so stumbled into entirely different stages while skipping others. I wish there was some sort of indication on what lead to different paths/endings, because it'd be fun to play more but I'm not going to do blind replays where I try new combinations of success/fail on each level to find new ones. Still, enjoyable!
Pick Pack Pup — This reminds me a bit of Puzzle League/Panel de Pon, which is a mark in its favour since that's my favourite puzzle game of all time, but it's certainly no clone. It's unusual among block puzzlers in that it doesn't have chains… more about actually lining things up to get bigger matches, and matching as many different icons as you can on one board. A bit slower, perhaps a bit more thoughtful. Had a great time going through the story mode, and definitely expect to play it irregularly from here on.
Week 4
Flipper Lifter — Move an elevator up and down to take penguins to their desired floors. It's very well-suited to the system, both for the pick-up-and-play factor and how it uses the crank… but I found it awfully slow and cumbersome. Too much waiting around, elevator moves slow, the later boards have annoying gimmicks (those goddamn birds…). I don't anticipate coming back to this one, to be honest.
Echoic Memory — I haven't finished this one yet, mostly because being built around sound makes it harder to quietly pop into. But I don't think I like it. It's just matching sounds against a (very generous) time limit, with no particular twist beyond that. I suppose the story does hint at something dark going on, but that doesn't really hook me. First whiff for me.