#playdate

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