I never believed in "love at first sight", but I know how to recognize when an idea was made for me. This feeling of yes-give-me-this-now-please was the only thing in my head when I saw the Playdate for the first time. This little gaming device created by Panic — a company who may know as the publisher of Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game — impressed me on how different it was compared to the current industry standards. In a decade dictated by frames per second and ray tracing capacities, pitching a black-and-white portable with a crank was truly bold. But making it a reality was just madness, and I loved it.

However, I'm just a latin american guy and getting a Playdate in this economy was impossible. Probably the shipping costs would be even greater than the device itself, and converting from US dollar is always a nightmare. Yet miracles can come true and a great friend of mine gave me a Playdate as a wedding gift last year! (thanks, Hugo 💛).

So, as you may have expected, I dove head first into all the Playdate could offer, including all the 24 (TWENTY-FOUR) games included with the device... and I decided to make this mega review of the Playdate itself and all of those games! I hope to give you a great introduction of how fun cranking is, what it's already possible in the small screen and who the device was created for.

(all that said, because I got the device as a gift in a specific situation, I won't comment on the question of whether the Playdate is worth the price. That said, I hope that this article helps to show you the pros and cons from the device so you can have your own conclusions about this!)

More than just a crank

Holding a Playdate for the first time is a really cute experience. The device is small, light, thin, toy-like and really, really yellow. Even the USB cable is yellow. And a good shade of yellow, it's needed to be said. Its design won't get comfort awards, but it feels good to play even in long sessions — at least, it's more comfortable than playing with my smartphone or the Nintendo Switch in portable mode. All the buttons are snappy, good to press and really responsive: besides the Lock and Menu buttons, you have a 4-direction D-Pad and the classic A and B buttons.

Oh, yes, the crank! Having an actually, usable crank as the analog input is probably the better (or, at least, the silliest) selling point of the Playdate and the big surprise is that... using the crank is fun! It's easy to undock it from the device (and when it's docked, it doesn't disturb the gameplay), and it feels good to turn it to control things in the screen. My only nitpick is when some games ask you to use the crank AND the A Button simultaneously, because it's really uncomfortable to my big hands — however, this is not considered a good practice by the creators of the Playdate and ends up being more the fault of certain games than the hardware itself.

The Playdate also has an accelerometer (similar to what your phone has) that can be really useful in some games, but I didn't played a lot of titles that use it yet. When researching for this review, I also discovered that the device ALSO HAS A MICROPHONE? I need more Playdate mic games now ASAP.

Another important part of the device is the black-and-white screen. Very different than a blocky Game Boy, Playdate's screen has a way higher definition that I was expecting and becoming the frame for some of the most beautiful 1-bit art that I ever seen. That said, like the original Game Boy, the screen isn't backlit so I need constantly to find a light source to be able to play. I always loved to play on my 3DS in the bed after my wife was already asleep and the Playdate didn't filled this need for me. Playing it on the balcony hammock with that Brazilian sun in my head was amazing, though.

It just feels fun (and inclusive)

Do you remember how fun video game operation systems seemed before? The first time you created a Mii and it became your version in that playful world? The first time you put a different theme on your 3DS HOME Menu? The first time you don't turn on a console and it just happened to have the most boring and sterilized interface ever? The people at Panic does remember because the Playdate have the most charismatic gaming OS of the decade.

When you boot up your Playdate for the first time, you have an amazing animated intro, with a banger soundtrack, that doubles down as a "tutorial" of how you can interact with the device — this intro is even better in color, just saying. And after that, every time you want to unlock it, you press the Lock Button twice, and a little robot eye opens up with each click. Each new app comes to you as a gift (with a personalized wrapper) that you open like it's Christmas day, and they can have special animations when booting up to visually integrated with the menu.

Those little details aren't the only things worth to talk about the Playdate OS. It also works really well, even with simpler options. Managing your installed games (and the ones available to be downloaded) is really easy and fast to do, even compared with other portables of the past. There's no SD card slot on the device (so you are stuck with the 4GB memory), but the games are so light that you will need do install dozens of them to start running out of space. The USB port is made to easily connect to any computer, so you can get your screenshots out of the device or put new files for games that are compatible with extra content (like the nonogram collection Sketch, Share, Solve).

But the best and more important feature of the Playdate for me is sideloading games. Instead of following the industry and creating another DRM to lock game sources (like any console out there), the amazing team at Panic decided the Playdate should be DRM-free. Yes, you can buy the games from the official Catalog (on the Web or in the device itself), but you can also get Playdate games from literally anywhere and they can be installed officially on your portable machine.

And it's not a hard thing to do: you can go into the Playdate official website, upload the files and and they are automatically available for download on your device. I literally did this from my phone during my honeymoon with some free games available on itch.io using our hotel's bad Wi-Fi and it worked! Even on my homebrewed 3DS, the process of installing a fan-made game is so complicated, but here is just not only easy, but friendly and encouraged!

Not only that, but every Playdate is also a developing kit for the system. You don't need expensive licenses or getting a specific machine to test your games, everything you need to start coding to the Playdate is available for free. To be fair, you don't even need to know computer programming, because Panic also created a simple game maker called Pulp that runs in your browser and exports Playdate game files. It's so refreshing for the industry seeing initiatives like this and I cannot be happier to see a healthy developer community being grown with this little cranky device.

The debut season

But what is a video game without... games! Instead of having the players going after their own software, the Playdate had an interesting strategy called Season One. On your first 12 weeks of having the device, two new (surprise) games will be installed in your Playdate for free. Besides some free games, those twenty-four games were mostly all the experience I had with my cranky machine until now and the rest of this review will be talking about them in a little bit of detail.

There are two interesting observations to do about this package of games. The first one is how wide the titles are, from genres, concepts and even uses of the Playdate features. Some of them are fully narrative, others are pure arcade joy. Some of them were created because of the crank, others ignore it totally. There are a lot of games in the Season One that I would never buy because they weren't my jam, while others hit so hard that I keep replaying them from time to time. So, even if I didn't like a game of the list, you still have a big chance of loving it.

The second is how they have that feeling of "early games" that you always have with launch titles of any console. All of the games available on Season One were commissioned by Panic before the device even released to the public. If you look now into the Catalog, for example, you will see games way more produced and inventive then most of these early ones, but this is just part of the nature of having a collection on day one. I don't think they represent the full capacity of the Playdate (and, to be fair, I don't think we reached this point yet), but they still are your first look into the device.

Now I present: all the games on Playdate's Season One on launch order (with my mini review for each one of them)!

Week 01: Whitewater Wipeout

I admit that it felt strange the choice of Whitewater Wipeout for the first week. Created by the team behind Cursed to Golf, the idea here is to use the crank to move a surfer and add up a lot of points (and combos) in pure arcade fashion. It's cool to show how the Playdate is a perfect vessel for this type of game, but the controls are really strange and hard to even understand. I know that a lot of people really connected with it and has a lot of tips and tricks for the game, but there are better arcade games in the next weeks.

Week 01: Casual Birder

Now we're talking! This duo in the first week shows how wide the Playdate games can be, and Casual Birder became one of my favorites since then. It's an adventure game about a bird photographer that want to expand his picture collection while dealing with bad guys that dominated the city. The crank is used to adjust the focus of your camera when taking photos of the birds during the game: it has some little bugs but it's a really cool gimmick overall. Some of the birds are almost puzzles to decipher, that adds another layer to the experience.

Week 02: Crankin's Time Travel Adventure

Co-created by Keita Takahashi (the mind behind Katamari Damacy), Crankin's Time Travel Adventure was a cool idea that overcame its welcome. The idea is using the crank to make time go forward and backward and help sleepy Crankin to find his lover before it's too late. Some elements of the level aren't affected by time travel, though, so you need to time Crankin's position to dodge all the obstacles. Yes, it's fun, but not for more than ten levels until it becomes too repetitive. Test it, have some fun with the concept and than go to another game.

Week 02: Boogie Loops

Season One was a way to show all the potential of the Playdate and having available a software that isn't exactly a game is important when thinking about this showcase aspect. Boogie Loops is a music creating app with cute animals that dance and I cannot talk more about it because I never understood the interface fully. I pressed some buttons, some noise came out of the device and I moved on.

Week 03: Lost Your Marbles

Visual novels are not exactly my type of game, so Lost Your Marbles was most an experiment to me than a title that I enjoyed. The whole idea is that you use a "marble machine" to help you having decisions, that it's just a crank minigame you have to do when choosing the outcome of a fork in the story. The characters were cute, the marble thing wasn't that good, but you have a scientist cat and everything is fine. If you like the genre, there's something here to you.

Week 03: Pick Pack Pup

If you've read 2023's Played of the Year ranking, you may already know this but Pick Pack Pup isn't only my favorite Playdate game to date, but probably the best match-3 game I ever played. Your goal is to help the good dog Pup in his first days at an employee of a cruel fulfillment center, while following a good story about how capitalism is the burden of our species.

Gameplay-wise, the idea is that matches don't disappear automatically: instead, they are boxed and become obstacles for future matches until you ship everything (and gets a bigger combo if you manage to ship a lot in one go). The story mode is short but really well-made, introducing new mechanics and flavors to make the game feel fresh. The game don't even use the crank, showing that the other limitations of the Playdate can also help great minds create innovative and fun titles.

Week 04: Flipper Lifter

Another arcade game in the Playdate line-up, Flipper Lifter feels like a Game & Watch Gallery minigame that jumped off from a GBA (or a WarioWare boss stage). You use the crank to move an elevator up and down, bringing penguins to the levels they want. I liked it when I was killing some time in the toilet, but in later stages, the Playdate small screen makes it hard to understand what's really happening. If you like arcade games, I think it's worth a try.

Week 04: Echoic Memory

The concept on Echoic Memory is really neat: a small story about futuristic personal assistants, our relationship with our own memories and a literal memory game that uses only sound. Your goal in each level is to listen musical cues and find what button can play the same song, using the crank as a modulator/tuner. It's more gimmicky that it sounds (!), and it was fun for some levels, but it got repetitive really fast. The story seems interesting, though.

Week 05: Omaze

The best definition of Omaze comes from the official page: "an ode to circles". One of my favorites from all the Season One and one of the only platformers in the list, everything in this game is a circle, from the protagonist until the elements in the screen. You use the crank to move the little circle and try to get at the goal point, avoiding spinning obstacles and using the other buttons to change directions. The "adventure" is really abstract, but I had a lot of fun with this one.

Week 05: Demon Quest '85

Demon Quest '85 was exactly the type of game that I would never have played if it wasn't part of a bundle like this. In a mix of visual novel and puzzle, you became a teenager trying to summon demons from hell to help you became more popular in high school. The story is short and not always landed for me, but it was fun studying the clues to find the best music, smell and vessel to attract each demon. An interesting idea, with a cool execution and some great 1-bit art. One of my favorites!

Week 06: HYPER METEOR

If you still need to be convinced that the Playdate is a great home for arcade games, HYPER METEOR is the title you need to play. Purely collecting points isn't exactly my jam, but the gameplay here is so fluid and good to experience that is hard to stop playing. Like the coin-operated games from yesterday, your job is to move a ship and break meteors — but you don't have a gun! The only way to rack up points is colliding with the white parts of the rocks, while avoiding the darker sides. This visual concept isn't only pleasing to see, but does wonders in the small screen. If you can't have a Playdate now, you can also play a colored version on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Week 06: Zipper

The name Bennett Foddy can be associated in your head with QWOP, Getting Over It or just pure frustration, but Playdate owners have another game of this creator to play, directly available on Season One. Zipper is a giant, one-level quest of a samurai trying to get revenge. Inspired by MSX classics, I tried a lot to understand how the enemies worked and what would be the best strategy, but, surprising anyone, was too frustrating to my taste. The visuals can be good to look, but they are the worse when you trying to see what's going on. Maybe you like it! (maybe not)

Week 07: Questy Chess

Questy Chess almost got me, because it does a lot of things right to my taste, but it fails on some details. You assume the role of the "chess program v1", trying to fight your way in the system and stop an update. I love this concept of creating worlds inside a computer, and mixing it with a classic board game makes it even better. In each level, you go on this "RPG", moving your piece as chess' rules determine and fighting other pieces. Unfortunately, the way you access other movements besides the pawn is done by consumable items, that you will need to boringly grind to solve the puzzles. I truly believe that allowing those abilities as permanent upgrades or level-based mechanics would result in a better experience.

Week 07: Executive Golf DX

I talked in the past about how I think that golf is the most boring sport ever made (for me), but mini golf video games were also cool and the Playdate could be an amazing vessel to them. Executive Golf DX tries it, but I think it misses the hole by a lot (pun intended). Although the corporate theme got my attention, the 2D side-scroller gameplay, the focus on verticality and the huge amount of obstacles weren't a good mix. Maybe the title is for someone, but I only got frustrated. (Do you want an interesting Playdate golf game? Check out Fore! Track.)

Week 08: Saturday Edition

Saturday Edition was one of the biggest surprises for me in Season One. This narrative game puts you in the life of John Kornfield, a man who was abducted in the past — and when the aliens apparently are coming back, an important key to solving the mystery. The game plays like a slow and simple point-and-click adventure, where your actions are basically talking to people and showing things from your inventory to them. The pacing was a little off too me, but the story intrigued me enough during all the playthrough. Even if you aren't a fan of the genre, I think you should check this with attention when the package arrives in your Playdate.

Week 08: Star Sled

The first Season One game made in-house by Panic, Star Sled also has the space-themed arcade machine as its inspiration. Here, instead of shooting, your goal is to capture Sparks creating a circle around them with your ship. BUT cloistering any enemy is an immediate Game Over, so you need to be really careful when flying and using your boost. I think this is one of the most satisfying uses of the crank in the whole package, although the small size of the objects in the already tiny Playdate screen was a problem to me. I wanted to play more, but I'm bad at it and got stuck on Mission D.

Week 09: Spellcorked

Spellcorked is the most gorgeous game in the whole Playdate's Season One, end of line. Your job is here is run a potion shop but without knowing exactly what each ingredient does at the start. You get orders from your laptop and uses trial-and-error to find the best way of doing the mixtures through simple but cool minigames. The team behind the game paid a lot of attention to the details — like tilting the Playdate vertically to bottle up the potions — but there isn't a lot of depth to the mechanics to keep the discovery process always fresh. A little repetitive, but always beautiful.

Week 09: Inventory Hero

Too repetitive and even a little forgettable, Inventory Hero was Panic's great miss on their own games for Season One. The concept is you are the inventory manager of an automatic RPG hero, using and discard items when needed. Luck was too present to the mechanic depth shine, and I just got bored after two matches. Not for me.

Week 10: Snak

I'm always amazed by how simple and smart Zach Gage's games are (and I'm talking as a person who has a big streak on Puzzmo!). His Playdate debut is also a simple but smart idea: Snak, in his own words, is "Snake plus jump". Yes, you can press a button to make the snake's head jump for some seconds, allowing you to avoid collisions with some enemies and even with yourself. There isn't a lot more to talk about, other than the game is really fun and perfect for small moments.

Week 10: Sasquatchers

I love stupid premises in my video games, so Sasquatchers got my attention since I opened the app for the first time. Here, you got the role of planner to a team of cryptozoologists, trying to take photos and videos from (supposed) fictional creatures, like a sasquatch. But you do this in a tactical RPG fashion, Fire Emblem-style: moving your units, uncovering terrain and avoiding being attack by the beasts. The crank is only used when you are actually taking a photo to get the best angle, that creates a new dimension to the game. Unfortunately, I'm the worst tactical RPG player ever lived, so you will enjoy this more than I did.

Week 11: Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke

Do you remember when portables didn't have the power to have the same games as their console counterparts, so you would have smaller titles of those franchises to compensate? I truly think the Playdate is the perfect modern vessel to those spin-offs to shine again! Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke isn't an amazing example, but I think it's the proof of concept. Featuring the unsettling mascot from Firewatch, this 2D platformer has a random level each time you starts running away from fire. With a ton of collectables but strange controls to find them, it wasn't for me, but I like the precedent.

Week 11: Battleship Godios

Changing fire bullets to balls that ricochet the screen is apparently a must for black-and-white portable devices? Battleship Godios is a side-scroller shooting game that only gives you a limited number of balls to destroy all the enemy ships and finish a run. Since you go back to the beginning of the game every time you die, the "trial-and-error challenge" became just pure frustration to me and I moved on.

Week 12: b360

Breakout is a classic, but it never impressed me in its original form. That said, variations of the brick-breaker mechanic are always welcome! The last game from Panic itself in this list, b360 is literally a full rotation in the idea (pun also intended): you use the crank to spin your paddle around a circle, bouncing the ball in all the directions. The game also suffers from small sprites in a even smaller screen, and some levels are specifically hard, but if you liked breaking bricks in the past, you will like to do here too.

Week 12: Ratcheteer

If you consider Ratcheteer the season finale, what a banger they reserved to finish Playdate's Season One! Inspired by some Zelda portable games, our hero is an apprentice mechanic trying to find their master in a cryo-colony in a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Exploring the overworld, crawling through dungeons and finding new items to progress are the basis of this adventure, that also uses the crank in clever mechanics. Some quality of life features were missing (even comparing with Link's titles on the Game Boy), but this is the perfect way to show how the Playdate can also be the home of bigger and more dense stories.

Who is the Playdate for, after all?

This was the question I asked myself since the Playdate was announced: who is it for? In an industry that is full of live service games, big 4K machines with ray tracing and 300h repetitive RPGs, why create a small portable device with a crank? Well, after a lot of hours in those Season One games, I think I found an answer. The Playdate was made for who likes experimental and different premises and games — and I'm happy that I'm one of those people.

I can have some issues with the hardware itself (yes, I really wanted a backlit screen) and the Season One games could be just the surface of what is already available, but I can see myself playing in the Playdate for years and years to come. Seeing this community grows around an inclusive concept, transforming limitations into greater ideas, and understanding why cranking is great... As everything that is new and strange, this device is always be a place to try new things and evolve what gaming is (even in black-and-white or with only two buttons).

At the back of the box, the first thing you can read is "We made the Playdate just for fun". And after having one, I believe them. And it's great to be part of it.