Playdate console review – all 24 games reviewed from Zipper to Ratcheteer

metro.co.uk:

GameCentral reviews the new indie-powered portable console whose main selling point is that you can control its games with a crank.

There isn’t any way to explain this that is going to seem sensible, but Playdate is a portable console, the size of a beermat, with a black and white screen and a crank on the side that is used to control some, but not all, of its games. You don’t buy the games separately but instead get a ‘season’ of 24 titles that are delivered at a rate of two per week. We’ve been sent them all at once, along with the console itself, and it sure is something different.

As you might guess, the games in question do not include the latest Call Of Duty, or anything approaching a big name game, but are instead exclusive indie titles made specifically to take advantage of the Playdate. We’ve described them all below but in a way that is a spoiler, as part of the appeal is getting a new game out of the blue and booting it up for the first time.

That is quite the novelty, as it’s impossible to predict what each game might be, with those in the first season ranging from simple puzzle and action games to more complex narrative led titles, turn-based strategies, and Zelda style adventures. We’ll review each of them in brief below, but we really would caution reading up too much about them, as that does risk spoiling the appeal of the whole concept.

In terms of the device itself, the Playdate has a black and white screen, two action buttons, and a D-pad. The crank on the side is used by the majority of the games but for a wide variety of purposes. Sometimes it’s merely a novelty and sometimes it’s an intrinsic part of the control system, such as one game where you’re trying to draw circles round collectible objects and