Playdate Season 1

A light adventure game in a world where birding is so competitive that a gang roughs up other other birders. It's cute and amusing, but has some very cryptic solutions to puzzles, a common weakness in adventure games. Still, it's fun.

An excellent choice for the first week of releases, this is an old-school "play until you lose" game. You're a surfer. Make huge jumps and spin like a top for points. Avoid getting hit by the cresting wave. The crank is intuitive: point crank down to make surfer go down, up to go up. A few controls are unfortunately undocumented except for loading-screen tips. I think the idea is that you're supposed to explore the game and discover them. I originally found Whitewater Wipeout frustrating, but I'm glad I came back.

Time Travel Adventure

From the creator of Katamari Damacy, in this game you use the crank to move a robot through an increasingly dangerous world to hurry to the date he's late for. The clever bit is that the world and the obstacles move as normal, but all you can do is move the robot forward and backward through a pre-recorded script for a given level. Horde of deadly warthogs? Rush backward to a house until they pass. Deadly bees at torso level? Maybe hang from a pole for a bit, stretching enough to create a gap for the bee to pass through. Is a deadly butterfly approaching at head height? Rush ahead to bend over to sniff a flower. Everything is kinda deadly. Anyway, it's amusing, although around the 15th level the levels started feeling a bit grindy.

What if Mario Paint's music creation tool added dance choreography? This isn't a game. It's a toy for making music. It's really well done. There are lots of neat options and 5 weird dancers to chroeograph. But the heart of the toy is composing music, and a gamepad is a terribly tool for that. The original Mario Paint featured a mouse controller, which I wish I had. I had 30 of so minutes of fun with Boogie Loops before I got tired of dealing with the interface. It's a solid toy, but perhaps for the wrong platform.

What if a marble maze, but sideways and with a goofy story. Another clever one. A mad scientist cat's human intern Prota tries a device designed to let her quickly know the correct answers to tricky questions. Mechanically, it's a sideways marble maze that you turn the crank to rotate. Just roll the ball along a nice flat floor to the correct answer and you're set.

Unfortunately Prota's pet dog freaks out at the cat, everything gets broken and the protagonist's brain is left a little... confused. Now when she needs to make a decision, instead of a flat floor, it's a maze, and instead of a single correct answer, there are three answers ranging from good to very, very bad (and silly). As one would expect, the "better" answers are harder to reach. Fortunately all she needs to do is find her dog that ran away after the incident.

The entire game is lighthearted, goofy, and charming. The city is a mix of... relatively normal humans and anthropomorphic plants and animals. It's never explained, it just is. You can't really "lose", you'll get to the ending and find your dog no matter what, but your results impact how you get there and the lives of the people you interact with. Did you support or discourage the cactus from quitting his job as an architect to become a competitive eater? Are your missing posters a picture of your dog's face under the word "Missing" on nice paper, or is it your dog's butt under "Is this you?" printed on a used sandwich wrapper?

On the down side, it's pretty short. There is replayability in that there 11 or so locations, of which you'll only visit 5 or so on any given run. But locations are chosen based on your results in deeply non-obvious ways, making intentionally finding them hard. Add in a lot of dialogue which can't be entirely skipped, and hunting down the different endings and locations becomes a chore. Still, it's a lot of fun. I wish there was more!

What if a match 3 game, but matches turn into walls? You're an anthropomorphic dog working for Fetch, a kinda evil company running an Amazon-like warehouse. Obviously to ship a product, you need to match at least three of it, at which point it turns into a seal package, possibly of highly improbable shape. The package acts as a wall. You can ship all ready packages at any time, but the rewards are better for shipping more simultaneously. This clever addition to the genre added a lot, while smaller variations through the main story mode helped keep it fresh. An absolutely great game!

A clever little action puzzle game. Penguins want rides from one floor to another. All you can do is use the crank to move the elevator from floor to floor. Hurry before get they too angry. That's it. It doesn't need any more. Although as you play you unlock new levels with additional complications. The second level has two elevator shafts and special "floors" that move you between them. The third is atop a mountain, and if you're not fast enough the penguins get attacked by birds. I burned out on this pretty fast, but it was fun!

You work on an assembly line performing final tuning on smart speakers (like Apple's HomePod or Amazon's Echo). To tune them you listen to a brief sample of techno music, then find the matching location in the device that plays that sample. Except you're on a time limit. If you run out of time or make a mistake, you blow a fuse, and if you blow all of the fuses the device is ruined, and as you advance through the game you need to use the crank to "tune in" the sound in each part of the device. Oh, and there is a story of some sort, maybe about the nature of being human? I don't know, I bounced off it. To me it feels too much like actual work.

The title art is deceptive, and it irritates me. But under the cover, there is an interesting idea. DemonQuest 85 is an adventure game of sorts, set in the 1980s, where teenagers summon demons to try and solve their typical teenager problems. You have choices about which friends to involve, which demons to summon, which tools to summon the demon, and which friend's problems to focus on at an given moment. And as a side effect, you impact the politics of hell. It's cute, but I found it a bit tedious and gave up.

Omaze

Omaze is a sort of obstacle course, but you're a little ball rolling along the interior of circles, only able to jump between circles where they touch. You roll around with the crank, and that proves difficult for me. I frequently find myself needing to go one direction, and quickly before an obstacle sends me back to the start, but instead I got the opposite direction. Still, it's unique, clever, and I got some fun out of it.

What if Asteroids, but you didn't have a gun? Instead of shooting the asteroids, you need to ram them. But only the white parts can be rammed; hit the black parts and you lose a life. Oh, and turn using the crank. It's clever and fun for a while, but it didn't click for me.

A clever puzzle game masquerading as a tactical combat game. As a samurai with a fatal wound, you try to enter the inner sanctum and kill the lord who betrayed you before you die yourself. The clever bit is that you can move as far as you want in a straight line; anyone you pass or run into dies. (Usually.) The effect feels right out of cinema where a warrior dashes past an opponent and cuts them down before they know what happened. However, after your dash your opponents get to move as many spaces as you just did, and they aren't limited to a straight line. So you can dash across the entire screen, but anyone still alive will likely have the movement to kill you. (After plotting your move, the crank lets you move through time to see where your opponents will move; so you never need to die accidentally.) Move quickly, as after 249 dashes, the samurai dies of his wounds.

The mechanics are never explicitly spelled out, and an essential mechanic can only be discovered by stumbling upon it. I think most people will discover it, but just in case...

Click here to reveal spoiler

Blood from one enemy can blind another, giving you another move before they react.

Games are pretty fast; I suspect you can win the game within 30 minutes. I wouldn't know, I've never beaten it. Enemies and critical items are somewhat randomly places, creating some replayability. An absolute gem of a game that I'd had hours of fun with.

A 2 dimensional, side-view golf game, with each "course" being several floors, each littered with desks, copiers, chairs, and lamps to be hopped over before reaching the elevator to the next set of floors. The game let you do the front 9 (all upward), the back 9 (all downward), or both. The game is similar to most golf games: you aim, then click to start a rapidly moving slider, click again for power and click a final time to put spin on the ball. The gameplay is distinctly more minigolf than golf and features various power ups that change how the ball behaves for one stroke. While amusing, I found it kind of random. Still, I enjoyed it for a full game.

Questy Chess is more of a puzzle game than an RPG. You start limited to a pawn, but can earn inventory items that let you act as another piece. The items are one use, but you can grind to get more, which gets to one of my annoyances: in practice you have unlimited access to any piece you've accessed, but it's gated behind repeating puzzles you've already solved. I got frustrated and gave up, but I expect with the right mindset it's fun.

Zip around space trailing a sort of lasso that you need to encircle stars with while avoid walls and enemies. An intriguing game that never clicked for me.

Saturday Edition is a weird, moody adventure game about John Kornfield, a man who believes he had been abducted by space aliens years earlier. There are new disappearances similar to the ones around the time you disappeared, so the police ask for assistance. It's dour and a bit draining, John feels like he's still processing trauma from the experience (which, surprisingly, was mostly good!). The puzzles are so-so, mostly straightforward, but with occasionally inexplicable cause and effect relationships. But I wanted to know what was going to happen, and it came to a satisfying conclusion. I'd try another adventure game from this team.

An RPG where all you do is decide which loot to equip or use. Work fast, as you don't have many inventory slots. Enemies regularly drop garbage on you, some of it, like bunnies, self-replicating. It's entertaining, although the speed means you'll spend all of your time focusing on the inventory and none on the animated battle above. I'm not sure it ends, it seems like once you reach the Glitch World, it continues there until you lose. Still, it's amusing and tense!

As a modern witch, take potion orders off the witch internet, create the potions using a variety tools on a variety of ingredients, and ship them. Cute and satisfying with lots of nice touches, including rotating the Playdate to pour a potion into its bottle. It does eventually get a bit repetitive.

What if Snake, but you could jump over your own body. Oh, and the apples move around and if they touch your body, they'll race up it and kill you if they reach your head, so maybe do something about that. It's a clever enough twist to make the classic fresh and exciting.

Sasquatchers tries something clever, and almost pulls it off: a tactics game where you never engage in violence. There is violence, mind you, the sasquatches and other cryptids will totally maul your team. But your team is just there to document them. For social media. Because it's the future.

The game has a fun premise. The characters are amusing, even the selfie obsessed leader manages to not be too much of an ass. The game has a neat mechanic where once you've positioned your team, you can go into a first person view to try and frame your photos.

I had a lot of fun, but ultimately it got a bit tiring. Missions are at night, naturally, so your visible area is very limited. Add in cryptids that move relatively quickly and "tactics" becomes largely guesswork. Your team can optionally have a team member who helps with this, but it's a limited benefit. And ultimately, I had a lot of success not worrying about getting mauled, just accepting the hits so long as I got the photos and videos.

What if Gradius was Breakout. In this side-scrolling shooter, you battle various space ships, but your weapon is a ball that bounces. Be sure to catch it or you'll just be without a ball at all. Screw up? A limited number of times you can rewind time and try again.

A platformer with randomly generated levels where Forest Ranger Forrest Byrnes rushes through procedurally generated levels trying to stay ahead of the forest fire and trying to rescue campers and collectibles along the way. Solid execution and enough variation to keep it fun for some time.

What if Breakout, except your paddle can circle the entire playfield. Oh, and every edge is doom. On the up side, you get walls on all four sides that can be hit a few times before they disappear. It's an interesting twist, but didn't grab me.

What if The Legend of Zelda, but mostly underground, and instead of a sword you have a giant wrench. It has an interesting setting; after an asteroid collision plunged Earth into an ice age, some people moved underground, some cryogenically froze themselves to await the end of the ice age, and some stuck it out on the surface. The underground areas get rather samey, and you'll need to make an external map to sort out room connectivity. Still, a lot of fun and a lot of game.