Ever since my original review of the Playdate some 2 years ago it’s sat not a couple meters from me, it’s notification light blinking every so often trying to tempt me back to play it. I’ve travelled with it on several occasions as its small size and USB-C power requirements making it an easy thing to throw in the bag for some light entertainment should I want it. For my numerous gamer friends it’s a bit of a conversation piece too, usually warranting a game or two before it’s handed back with a cheerful smile (likely because they didn’t have to spend a couple hundred bucks to find out they didn’t need to buy it). Recently though I found myself digging into a couple titles more than I thought: partly for lack of a better alternative but also because one of them had enough buzz for it to reach my usual feed readers.
That game was Touch Egg.
Simple premise: you want to touch the egg and there’s someone there who doesn’t want you to. Should the egg watcher catch you touching his (is it his? This is never made particularly clear) he’ll take one of your fingers as a price. You have at your disposal though the EGG SnuZ, a system that’ll lull him back to sleep so you can continue with your relentless egg touching ways as you vy for the highest score that you can manage. It’s weird, interesting and basically everything I’d come to expect of most games that release on the Playdate.
Passing the game around between several mates of mine we spent a good long while not really knowing what the mechanics were and, as is tradition, we didn’t bother looking them up either. This led to an amazing array of strategies to get the high score all of which were completely sub-optimal to the real way to do it. Still though that was part of the shared fun of it all: seeing how far each of us could push the various limits until we were all thumbs and it was the next person’s turn.
I think my top score is now around 160 and beyond hooking up the crank to a power drill I’m out of ideas for optimising that much further. Still that’s really all I could ask for from a game like this: maybe 30 mins of fun total split between a bunch of mates. In my mind that’s what this platform is all about too: experimenting with whacky ideas that might not merit a second look anywhere else.
Fulcrum Defender is a bit more serious though. As I’ve been enjoying Vampire Survivor style games of late I wondered if there was anything like that on the Playdate and there is thanks to the devs from Faster Than Light. In their game you’re a round ship in the middle of a battlefield that’ll be constantly bombarded by shapes. Your goal is simple: survive for 10 minutes. You’ll do this by shooting down shapes, levelling up, upgrading current and forging new weapons and trying to strategize about which shapes represent the biggest threat to your meagre shield pool. It definitely falls into that category of easy to learn, hard to master kinds of games but it’s still a fun way to blast away 10 minutes if you have to.
Indeed I lost a good 17 minutes to it just then as I was playing it through to grab a couple screenshots for this review. Whilst you’re not going to find some ludicrous, fill the screen with bullets style build here you’ll still have ample opportunity to build something that feels powerful. At least for the first 10 minutes anyway as the game starts to really ramp up the pressure once you’re past that mark. It’s also probably the first game where I’ve seen some performance degradation, probably due to me using all my rockets with ricocheting bullets all over the screen all at once.
Would I recommend grabbing a Playdate for these two games? Definitely not, unless you can get one used for a good price anyway. The Playdate has always been a niche platform and unless you’re like me, someone who’s got money to spare for these kinds of things, I’m still yet to find a compelling title that would have me make such a recommendation. Still if you can get your hands on one it’s a fun little distraction, neatly filling that hole that was left by the death of mobile gaming into the cesspit of microtransactions and whale farming that it’s become. If you have a friend who has one I’d say throw them the requisite dollarbucks to grab these titles so you can have a go on them. They’ll probably thank you for it.
Rating: 7/10
Touch Egg and Fulcrum Defender are available exclusively on the Playdate console right now for $1 and $6 respectively. Total playtime in Touch Egg was approximately 20 minutes and Fulcrum Defender approximately an hour.
