A lot of playdate games are conspicuously of their time. I’m not going to say they’re zeitgeisty but there’s a specificity to the characters and settings and thematic choices that makes many of them obviously products of the here and now. More than one is worried about the precariousness of modern labour. I think the small scales and low prices open the system to this sort of experimentation and focus. It reminds me a bit of iOS gaming before the race to the bottom.
Spellcorked! is just the best looking game on the console. The animation is lovely and the bold, big art style works really nicely in silver and black. As for the game itself, it’s a cozy, tactile little potion-making game where you blend, grind, stir and augment ingredients to produce effects requested by your mail-order customers. Learning how the ingredients and techniques interact is part of the process, helpfully tracked in your Grimoire. Really reminds me of early DS software through its inventive, physicalising use of the device features.
Inventory Hero is real time loot management at a frenzied pace. The hero fights automatically and the loot falls in to six slots from which you must discard it or use/equip it. Is that new armour an improvement or trash? Should you save that spell? By the second stage you have tens of milliseconds to decide. A nice short-burst high score chaser.
