Game Thoughts: The Playdate

On my recent international vacation I found myself in transit with alarming frequency. Between trans, taxi rides, layovers, and 14-hour flights I had a lot of time in my hands.

I also had a gaming console in my hands, for I rarely leave home without at least one mechanism for playing games. I recently got my hands on a second-hand Playdate which I very quickly fell in love with. The Playdate is a retro-inspired console with a monochrome LCD non-backlit screen and a crank.

(It was designed in partnership with Teenage Engineering, and I'm honestly a huge sucker for anything those folks design.)

Games for the playdate can be "side-loaded" (downloaded from Itch.io or other places) or purchased and installed from the official playdate store -- after which you need to actually download the games which takes a very long time. Perhaps the slow downloads were another attempt at retro, invoking the pain of a dial-up connection.

Games range from $2-$15 on the online store, and most of the games fall into the "cool tech demo" range that, quite honestly, I wouldn't normally pay for. $5 will get you a full-blown 10+ hour game on sale on Steam, while $5 on playdate indies might net you a basic arcade game or a 3 hour Zelda clone that would normally be free somewhere like Itch.io.

That said, I didn't find myself hesitating to drop a few bucks on Playdate titles. Maybe this was just excitement for the platform, but it may also just be part of the magic of what feels like a smaller indie-focused community -- much like buying music from Bandcamp.

I'm going to break my game insights down below into the following categories:

  • Intentional Purchases where I actually directly paid money for a game through the Playdate store
  • Season Games which kinda just show up on the device (I also dropped like $30 on season 2)
  • Sideloaded Games which were either free or bought on Itch.io

And finally an overall review of the Playdate after abusing it for a few weeks.

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Intentional Purchases

EYELAND Is a very simple adventure game with some puzzles. It was very cute and graphically nice, but ultimately felt like someone's first game and really wasn't worth the money.

Resonant Tale Is a tiny zelda-like which I honestly had a great time playing. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but they really figured out how to distill the formula down into a bite-sized good time.

Mars After Midnight Is by the guy who made Papers Please and follows a similar (but weirder) concept where you admit funky-looking aliens to group help sessions. It was fun and visually impressive, but the game badly needed to change up the formula a little more frequently.

Oquonie A puzzle game by 100 rabbits (the creators of Orca & uxn) which is impressive just for existing, as they ported uxn to the Playdate and then ported the original oquonie to uxn. The game is a confusing fever dream where figuring out how the hell to play it is part of the puzzle. After the first 30-ish minutes randomly doing stuff it clicked, and I had a really good time getting through the rest of it. (I don't actually know if I beat it, it's a mysterious game)

Playbook E-Reader This is both the worst and most expensive E-reader app I have ever used. I'm kinda ashamed to have spent $5 on it, and you need to manually convert your ebooks to .txt files to read them. That said, it is kinda great if you throw some short story collections on it.

Spilled Mushrooms This is the star of the show, hands down, no question. Of the games I purchased this one has the most going on for it and is infinitely replayable -- it's a puzzle game where you get different animal cards and solve levels by coming up with clever combos of your card abilities (eg: this card doubles the power of the next card you play). Apparently there's an expansion coming. Happy with this purchase.

Seasonal Games

I'm not an arcade games person, and a lot of the games that come with the season packages have turned out to be very arcadey or flash-game like. I'm not particularly impressed by games like Flipper Lifter or Wheelsprung though I'm sure these games do appeal to some people.

I haven't been through the full catalogue from both seasons, but I'll just highlight the games I DO like from the seasons so far. Season 2 hasn't been worth the asking price, honestly.

Casual Birder (S1): A little adventure game with a very funny story and great graphics where you take pictures of birds and other things. Really well put together.

Crankin's Time Adventure (S1) Very visually fun and funny, and did more than I expected -- but fuck this game after level 18.

Dig Dig Dino (S2) Fantastic fun game where you dig up dino bones like that one pokemon mini games. Story goes silly places. 100%-ed this one.

The Whiteout (S2) Very good side-scrolling adventure game with a dark story. I want to see more games like this, as I think the device excels with them.

Side-loaded Stuff

Celeste Classic Celeste is good no matter what -- be it the modern version or the original Pico-8 version. Turns out the pico-8 version but in black and white still holds up!

SNK An isometric snake clone one of my Mastodon friends made. I've never played snake as long before, and managed to get a high score of 900

CrankBoy Now THIS is some good shit. A gameboy emulator that runs pretty well, but most interestingly the emulator will apply patches for you dynamically, and even hot-patches some games (Zelda, Kirby) so that the HUD bars are on the right vertically to give a full-screen experience.

Playdate Itself

The Playdate isn't perfect. Really far from perfect. Some of that is intentional -- the lack of a backlight, the limited available buttons, the tiny screen; these are all things that are negatives but nostalgic (and the reason I wanted the thing in the first place.)

There's other issues, though. The battery is shockingly bad for such a low-power device, the official case is already showing wear on it after 3 weeks, and I already started having the first hints of crank "drift." The download speeds may also be the slowest I've seen since I was a 10.

The worst offense, however, has been the stability of the device. The thing warns you to make sure you safely eject if you connect it to a computer, but after trying to mount the device to my phone (which failed and didn't have a safe eject button) NONE of my games worked any longer. It basically nuked the device, forcing me to re-install every game (which, as I mentioned, takes forever)

I thought this may have been a fluke, but this happened again later when I accidentally knocked the device while plugged into my laptop. Just fucked the whole thing up and half the games broke again. I'd be lying if I said this hasn't made me a little lukewarm on booting the little guy up again.

Overall, however, the Playdate served me well on my trip. I got through half a novel and probably played 20-30 hours of games -- not a great value proposition for a 200$ device and 80$ worth of games, honestly, but there's been a lot of novelty, the thing is portable as hell, and there are presumably more games to come. This definitely isn't a console for everyone, but it is definitely a console for me.

I'd also love to try developing a game for it -- we'll see where that goes ;)