Collin Donnell

If like me, you bought a Playdate when it came out, played some or all of the games in Playdate Season One, and then put it in a drawer, I strongly recommend checking out Season Two.

My issues with season one was that most of the games I played were pretty shallow, and didn’t really hook me (Pick Pack Pup being an exception) after playing them a couple of times. Mostly, they felt like tech demos for the hardware, and many of them used the crank way more than I would have wanted. The crank is kind of like motion controls on a Nintendo console. A little can be fun, but it has to be used judiciously. The only fully crank based game I sort of clicked with was Whitewater Wipeout.

Based on how much I played season one, when I saw season two was $39 for twelve games, I didn’t think I was going to buy it. Cut to me two days later, up late in the guest room of a friend’s house in Salt Lake City. I bought it on a whim.

The first game I played — Fulcrum Defender — felt straight out of season one. Not much to it, and fully crank based. This game could definitely be for someone, but not so much me. The next game I tried was a completely different story.

Something about the game loop of Dig Dig Dino hooked me immediately, and I spent the next three days or so playing it to completion. The conceit is that you are an intern for a group of anthropomorphized animal archaeologists. You dig up dinosaur fossils, upgrade your gear to dig more quickly, break rocks, etc, and put together complete fossils. As you go, you also uncover artifacts, which seem to be slowly telling a story. I won’t spoil it, but things get progressively more insane up until the end. Absolutely this is the first Playdate game that got me hooked like this.

Yesterday, week two showed up, and I started playing The Whiteout, and I think I like it even more. Here’s the marketing line:

The Whiteout is a chapter based, narrative-driven adventure game that takes place in the not-too-distant future. You’ll play as a lone traveler in a dangerous and broken world: society has collapsed, food is scarce, and trust is not affordable.

More succinctly — did you ever wish Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was a sprite-based game on a niche handheld console with 1-bit graphics? Well, that’s what it’s like. It’s fantastic and I can’t stop playing this one either. I haven’t even started Wheelsprung yet, but that looks cool too.

If you also saw the $39 price tag and decided that was too much, or your Playdate has been sitting in a drawer for the last year with a dead battery, I promise you that based on the first four out of twelve games, season two is absolutely worth it.