Latest news with #Playdate
Metro
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Playdate Season 2 full review – the best games on the weirdest console
The black and white portable console with a hand crank as a controller has completed its second season and the games have proven just as odd as the hardware. The Playdate handheld, with its perfectly weighted crank and immaculate hardware design has been out for just over three years, and while it hasn't quite set the world on fire it definitely has plenty of devotees. At launch it came with a 'season' of 24 games that arrived as a drip feed of two per week, and made for a delightful introduction to the system, even if we never found ourselves playing any of them after the first few weeks. Season 2 is just over half the size, bringing you 12 games – along with Blippo+ which is more of an interesting curio than a game. Once again, the variety really impresses, with original and highly unusual games that are built for a system with significant and quite deliberate limitations. It's fascinating to see how developers adapt, and this season comes with some real highlights. Week 1 Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. As openers go, they don't get much braver than Blippo+, which isn't a game at all. It's a set of video streams supposedly from the planet Blipp, showcasing bizarre trashy cable TV type content of the sort that used to populate daytime telly in America in the 80s. It takes a while for streams to load on the Playdate, but the slightly grainy content somehow really suits the tiny device. Quite what it's attempting to convey we have to concede we never really figured out, although there are some common themes you start picking up as you watch more of its abject weirdery. Engineered around aiming using the crank, Fulcrum Defender is a circular and completely manual tower defence game from Subset Games, makers of FTL and Into The Breach. Unusually, you have to prevent various shapes, that fly in from the screen edges, from reaching the core in the middle. Enemies employ different flight paths and tactics to avoid your defensive fire, while your advantage comes from power-ups and special weapons, in a fast-paced and precise shooter whose trance beats help augment the sense of being in the zone. One of the most substantial of season 2's games, this has you playing palaeontologist, excavating dig sites in search of dinosaur bones and lore-conferring alien artefacts. Its clever use of black and white textures does a great job of representing the different strata you dig through, while upgrading everything from your shovel to bone-detecting sonar proves pleasantly addictive. An involving game that proves hard to put down once you're in the swing. Week 2 Riding Wheelsprung's tiny trials bike is an exercise in balance, throttle control, and braking to avoid obstacles and ensure you don't hit the ground with enough force to destroy your bike. Its 34 side-scrolling tracks swiftly become extremely challenging, with each requiring multiple attempts even to figure out which way to go and what approach you should take, let alone actually reaching the end. Deep, subtle, and physics-based, it demands dedication to reveal its charms. After an icy but unspecified cataclysm that's wiped out human civilisation, you trudge around its wreckage trying to eke out an existence scavenging through the snowy debris. As usual, the real horrors are other people, some of whom can be friendly but are often horribly bad news. Its melancholy tone and world-building, your character's reminiscences overlaid on your exploration, are punctuated by inventory puzzles and moments of savagery perpetrated by fellow survivors. Your ultra-slow walking pace and continual backtracking are in keeping with the mise en scène but can grate. Week 3 This crank-orientated animal catching game has you controlling a cat with a hoop. Your job is to swing it over an unwary creature and then rapidly turn the crank to encircle it, adding it to your inventory, and capturing multiple enemies if you time it right. Its mechanics and locomotion are unlike anything you're likely to have played before and take some getting used to, giving seasoned gamers a brief glimpse of what it must be like for non-gamers to pick up a controller for the first time. An accurate recreation of the 1987 game, Shadowgate, complete with single channel audio tunes and monochrome still frame graphics, played by selecting an action from a list, then moving the cursor to apply it to something on screen. It's an incredibly clunky control scheme, but it just about gets the job done. Even overlooking the inherent unwieldiness, it's almost unbelievably difficult, with obtuse puzzles that are seemingly immune to logic and instant death around every corner. By today's standards it's all but impossible and in the years before internet walkthroughs it's astounding that anyone could have worked out how to complete it. Week 4 You're an extendable dachshund, the crank stretching your sausage dog body to try and reach pieces of food, each of which makes you longer, a bit like old classic, Snake. The lengthier you get, the better your reach, letting you access previously inaccessible areas, then at the end of each level you crank out a dog egg whose size depends on how much you've managed to eat during your escapades. It's quite the oddity, if not the most compelling of this season's titles. Otto's Galactic Groove is a funky rhythm action game with the messy hip-hop spirit of Jet Set Radio, blended with the otherworldliness of Space Channel 5. Its story is purposely bizarre, even if its rhythm action is more or less as you'd expect, apart from a reliance on the crank to target the notes you tap. You'll also need to use it to hold sustained notes, which slope up and down, and in Extreme difficulty turn into improbable zig-zags that you'll need to track at speed. It features admirably eclectic musical styles, and you can really hear when you miss a beat. Week 5 To destroy the black holes threatening your planet you need to launch black holes of identical size to cancel them out. Adjust the diameter of each hole using the crank, aim and fire, the difference between the size of the one you shoot and the one you hit getting deducted from your health bar. You'll also need to avoid space tourists, amongst other obstacles, by bouncing black holes off the wall to target their harder to reach counterparts, in levels that sadly aren't all that much fun. This season's undoubted star is Taria & Cosmo, a 2D side-scrolling puzzle platform adventure about a girl and her grapple hook robot, which she can fire out and stick onto certain surfaces, letting her swing or suspend herself from them. You use the crank to aim the grapple, then once attached, lengthen and shorten the rope, letting you perform increasingly dazzling acrobatic moves as you get used to the unusual feel of traversal. Despite the small screen some of your antics feel elegant – majestic even – and its narrative is a searing satire of cold-hearted corporate control and the American medical system. More Trending Week 6 You're a small, two-armed turnip, exploring a sizeable map by climbing your way around it, the crank swinging one arm, then the other, as you grip and release. New skills you unlock open up new parts of the map, Metroidvania style, and just getting around is enough of a test on its own until you get the hang of it. You'll soon find yourself becoming more proficient, which is just as well given the lifts, pinball-style plungers, and rows of spikes you'll need to navigate as you explore, making frequent use of the map. Chance the dog's point 'n' click adventure is just under an hour's worth of novelty grade good luck/bad luck scenarios, that see its law-breaking canine anti-hero alternately tormented and rewarded by fate. Starting with a flat tyre and a lost mobile, that prevent him warning his gangster pals of their imminent arrest, he immediately falls down a manhole into the sewer, and that's just the start of his mini-calamities. Set in a city populated by talking dogs, cats and duck-billed platypuses, it makes good use not only of the crank, but also the Playdate's microphone and accelerometer. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: PlayStation sues Tencent over Horizon 'clone' Light Of Motiram MORE: Lewis Hamilton admits he's cancelling work just to play new video game MORE: 90s Nintendo classic Mario Paint is now on Switch 2 with mouse controls
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Playdate Season Two review: A dozen freshly baked bite-sized treats – and one very strange snack
But this compact machine with its diminutive monochrome screen and wacky crank-handle control mechanism does more than scratch a retro itch for hipsters. Since its low-key launch in 2022, it has quietly built up a library of more than 250 titles, many quirky, a handful no more than a novelty (the 99 cent joke, for instance) but most are inexpensive (very few cost more than a tenner) and offer hours of entertainment for much less than the price of a pint. Besides the likes of the PS5 (75 million sales and counting), the number of Playdates in the wild is a bit of a rounding error (probably no more than 70,000) – not helped by its relatively steep price. Though it started out at under €200 in 2022, the inflation squeeze has pushed that figure to almost €280 now, once import fees are factored in. You feel that a gaming giant such as Nintendo would be selling such a machine at €150 or under thanks to its market power. But the Playdate's US maker is just a smallish software developer out of Oregon with big dreams. One detail that somewhat justifies the cost is the inclusion of a 'season' of 24 free games delivered to every new owner automatically. This summer, three years on from the Playdate's debut, Season Two has finally arrived – albeit at an extra cost of about €40 and with a count of just 12 titles. Styles range from point'n'click adventure (three of 'em) to platforming to tower defence but Playdate's unusual crank-based handle usually adds something unorthodox to the mix. Music rhythm game Otto's Galactic Groove, for instance, mixes original earworm tunes with a beat-matching mechanic requiring adroit rotation of the crank to hit the right notes. In a crowded genre full of colour and spectacle, it suffers a little by comparison due to a lack of gloss yet holds its own for the most part. The Whiteout offers a very bleak story with its simple point'n'click version of the post-apocalypse. It's no Last of Us but even with limited pixels conveys the dread of a survivor in a ruined civilisation. As an antidote, the archaeological tranquillity of Dig! Dig! Dino! feels like a relaxing warm bath or a cup of hot cocoa before bed. You're charged with unearthing dinosaur bones at a series of dig sites, the gameplay a simple loop of building your resources and tools to comb through layers of the ground for historical treasures. No pressure, no time penalties, no failures. Several more also await you and even if some such as Fulcrum Defender (a riff on Asteroids) and Shadowgate PD (a remake of an NES point'n'click) didn't fully grab me, the overall bundle is hard to resist. That's even before you consider the bizarre bonus that is Blippo+ for which nothing will prepare you. Nothing that is unless you remember the psychedelic ramblings of Max Headroom, a 1980s TV experiment on Channel 4. ADVERTISEMENT Like the disjointed, glitchy sketches by talking head presenter Headroom, the scenes in Blippo+ defy explanation and are seemingly the work of a group of performance artists from Oregon and California featuring real actors pretending to be shows on a particularly wacky TV station. You can flick from channel to channel with the crank and stop long enough to watch the hyperactive antics. Blippo+ is continuing to add shows for the next few weeks but there's already plenty to fry your brain, in a good way, even though it's all passive viewing as opposed to anything interactive. Season Two may have fewer titles than the Playdate's first collection but the hit rate seems higher, with barely a dud note among the fresh dozen and equating to about €3.50 per game.
The Verge
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The Playdate is getting folders.
The Playdate has been out since April 2022 — here's how it's going See all Stories Posted Jul 28, 2025 at 10:48 PM UTC The Playdate is getting folders. System update 3.0, which Panic says is coming later this year, will let you make folders for your games, adds a Game Library app, and brings support for 'storing hundreds of games on your Playdate.' Seems like a great update, especially if you have a lot of titles from the Catalog or need to organize after finishing the second season of games. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Jay Peters Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jay Peters Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News
The Verge
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Playdate's second season sucked me back into the little yellow handheld
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 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.
Engadget
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Playdate Season 2 review: Taria & Como and Black Hole Havoc
We've officially made it to the end of Playdate Season Two, and what a season it's been. Despite having half the number of titles as Season One, this latest round of weekly game releases has made a much stronger impression (on me, at least). If nothing else, it's just been cool to experience the new games in real time with other Playdate owners all at once, which the staggered rollout of the console didn't really allow for with the first season. In an email ahead of the final release, the team at Panic noted that Season Two has sold 12,000 units. It ends on a high note with Taria & Como and Black Hole Havoc , the former an emotional physics-based platformer and the latter an action-puzzle game about blasting black holes with black holes. While the weekly game drops may be over, we still have several weeks left of new Blippo+ content to help fill the void (not to mention the reruns, once it all wraps up). Popseed Studio Inc/JuVee Productions Taria & Como would surely resonate no matter when it were released, but at a time in the US when families are being forcibly separated and access to adequate healthcare for millions of people is under threat — an issue that comes on top of the many existing flaws of the system — it hits particularly hard. The pace of this puzzle platformer is relatively chill, but the journey it takes you on is really moving. You play as Taria, a girl whose parents have been kidnapped by the medtech company and apparent authoritarian overlord, Toxtum Inc. Taria uses a couple of mobility aids to get around, including a prosthetic leg that allows her to jump and a flying health robot, Kit, that has a tether so she can swing. But after a disaster one day, Taria wakes up in a Toxtum facility to find that her younger sister Como is gone, her prosthetic leg has been taken and replaced with one that cannot jump (the Toxtum-approved design), and her healthbot has been swapped with one that's programmed to do everything in its power to restrict her freedom. The subsequent adventure is Taria's quest to find her sister, no matter what it takes. There is a lot to love about this game, but there's one silly little thing at the beginning that needs a shoutout: an unexpected folder in Kit's files labeled "Ferrets." Inside that folder? Two pictures of ferrets wearing bonnets. As a longtime ferret owner, all I have to say is hell yeah . Anyway, the game. Taria & Como is a wonderful experience from start to finish. Each chapter is preceded by a beautifully illustrated crank-to-scroll comic that moves the story forward, and the game's unique mechanics overall made this a really compelling play for me. Since Taria can't jump post-disaster, most of the game is spent swinging (and arguing with the new, not-cool healthbot). Moving around this way requires some planning, as the platforms Taria can stand on are often separated by walls and other obstacles, and some surfaces aren't safe for landing. You use the crank to aim the bot at a grabbing point, and you can crank forward/backward to reel Taria in and out. Swinging left and right will give you momentum to launch yourself farther so you can cross bigger gaps, and you can kick off of walls. I had so much fun with this, and loved how the design of it all slowed me down and made me think a little harder. As you progress, you'll collect pieces from Como's diary as well as Tuxtum files and codes to hijack the healthbot in your favor. The means by which you access these files is one of my favorite parts of the game. There are kiosks scattered throughout the map and they all contain a single minigame, which features a turtle wearing a top hat. Crank to make the turtle dance — and crank really fast, so he can't keep up, and the whole thing will glitch out and bring you to the system files. I was perhaps too excited the first time I encountered that, and enjoyed it every time after that too. Over the course of her adventure, Taria runs into other people who have also been failed by the system: someone who can no longer take the medication they need because it isn't "company approved," someone whose has been waiting in vain to be reunited with their wheelchair, etc. All the while, the healthbot talks down to Taria with the most painfully infantilizing rhetoric. The commentary here is pretty blatant, and I can't say I didn't appreciate it as someone who has been burned by the healthcare system many times over my lifetime of trying to manage chronic illnesses. There were a few hiccups in my playthrough. The game seemed to lag a lot with every chapter change, briefly making me worry each time that it was going to crash. And my Playdate didn't always respond properly to certain actions, like when you want to just look around to survey Taria's environment. You need to dock the crank to do that, which in itself felt a little disruptive, and I often found myself just launching Taria into the unknown to find out what was down there the hard way instead. On several occasions when I did dock the crank, my Playdate didn't register that I'd done so, especially toward the end of the game, so I had to repeatedly dock and undock it until it eventually worked. These things ultimately didn't detract much from my enjoyment of the game, though. Taria & Como is definitely one of my favorites from this season. It's a beautiful story, and it couldn't have come at a better time. Years of playing the Neopets game Faerie Bubbles has prepared me for this moment. The story behind Black Hole Havoc is pretty easy to glean from the title — black holes are popping up everywhere and threatening civilization, and you have to stop them. Thankfully, you and your pal are equipped with just the right equipment to generate black holes of your own, which you can fire from a cannon at the evil black holes to cancel them out. But they have to be the right size or they won't effectively vanquish their targets. You aim using the D-pad and pump with the crank (or A/B) to adjust the size of your own black holes before shooting them out. Hit a black hole with another of the wrong size and you'll take damage. Initially, it all seems fairly easy. You'll have aim assist for the first few levels, which provides a clear visual indicator of the path and size of your black holes. But after that, you're on your own to line everything up right (you can turn aim assist back on in the settings, if need be). The further you get, the more obstacles are thrown your way. The black holes start growing in numbers; space tourists show up and get in the way of everything; the ceiling starts collapsing, pushing the black holes down onto you; blocks of ice will send black holes bouncing back your way if you hit them; weird giant bugs. It all goes from chill to extremely un chill pretty fast. The Story Mode is great, with 80 levels and fun cutscenes (which are skippable if you're impatient, but they really are worth watching) to introduce the new areas you'll have to clear. That sounds like a lot of levels, but I was absolutely flying through them and was 40 levels deep before I knew what was happening. There have been a few games this season that I've found to be super addicting, but Black Hole Havoc kind of takes the cake for me in that category. It just ticks all the right boxes. There's also an Arcade Mode if you want to just jump right in and chase after higher and higher scores. From the art and animations to the music, developer Cosmic Bros really knocked it out of the park with this one. Not a bad way to finish a fantastic season.
