The Playdate is easy to forget about. It’s colorful and weird, but it’s also tiny. Like the Game Boy Micro before it, sometimes I toss it in a bag and then can’t remember where I put it. But over the past few weeks, the yellow handheld has been in constant rotation in my house, despite being up against big distractions like Mario Kart World and Death Stranding 2, thanks to the Playdate’s now-complete second season of games.
The seasonal structure is one of the unique aspects of the Playdate. When the handheld first launched in 2022, owners got access to a curated selection of 24 games that were released over time. It was a great introduction to the device and its unique features — the crank, the little display, the black-and-white graphics — but it wasn’t until earlier this year that a second season kicked off. (I should note that this doesn’t mean there weren’t any new games for the Playdate, as a digital shop launched in 2023, and there are plenty of titles to sideload from marketplaces like Itch.io.)
Season 2 kicked off in May, and while it’s smaller — you get 12 games for $39, plus whatever the heck the FMV-based Blippo Plus is — it also got off to a very good start. And since then it’s expanded with quite a variety of games. There’s a post-apocalyptic adventure called The Whiteout, and a point-and-click exploration game called Shadowgate PD, which is actually a remake of a game from the ‘80s. The dozen titles in season 2 do a solid job of showing off the range of possibilities on the Playdate.
But what has struck me most are the games that make clever use of the handheld’s signature feature: its crank. For instance, Tiny Turnip is a climbing game where you play as a turnip with arms. Getting around means using the face buttons for grabbing on to things, and then moving your body around with the crank. It felt a little awkward at first, probably because I hadn’t played anything quite like it before, but eventually I was able to get into a solid rhythm of cranking my way across perilous terrain. It’s really satisfying smoothly moving your way through the world by twisting a crank around.
Taria & Como offers something similar within a more typical side-scrolling platformer. You can move and jump through a pixel art world, but in order to navigate the most perilous areas, you’re aided by a sort of drone / grappling hook that’s aimed with the crank. You fire it off and then swing yourself where you need to be. You can also use the crank to pull yourself up or down. Taria & Como is a relatively slow-paced physics-based platformer with some challenging puzzles, and the inclusion of the crank adds a satisfying layer of tactility to the experience.
Perhaps my favorite game is also arguably the strangest. It’s called Long Puppy, and it’s almost like a spiritual successor to Noby Noby Boy (albeit one not developed by Keita Takahashi, who is off doing his own weird stuff). The goal is simple: you are a dog who needs to fetch a ball. But it always seems to be in some hard-to-reach spot, and the only way to get to it is to stretch. In order to stretch longer, you need to eat lots of food. And so each level becomes a race to eat as much as you can so you can get to the ball before a weirdly angry ghost dog shows up.
Naturally, you use the crank to both grow and shrink, so even though Long Puppy is a game about a pup, you move more like a caterpillar inching its way through the levels to gobble up everything they can quickly. Again, it takes some getting used to, but the time limits forced me to get really good at stretching and it was a blast. Also, at the end of each level you use the crank to go poo.
Of course, these games would’ve still been enjoyable if I stumbled across them in the Catalog store. But there’s something exciting about the big moment the Playdate seasons create. Each week I anticipate something new, and am never really sure what it will actually be. It could be more channels for a bizarre fictional television service, or it could be the most challenging (and adorable) game of fetch I’ve ever played. That steady cadence of weird and fun makes the Playdate much harder to forget about.
