Resisting the urge

“Did I hear you say that there must be a catch?”

For the first time in a long time, this fool’s money was safe and sound. Usually the lure of nice gimmicky hardware is too much to resist, but something about the prospect of Playdate made me stop before clicking the big PREORDER button.

I was dangerously close though.

Since Playdate’s reveal in Edge magazine roughly 20 years ago, I’ve been on board. It looked dinky, cute and imaginative - that crank! I really liked the ethos behind it too; a desire to make something truly unique and fun to use, deliberately at odds with any sort of hardware arms race. The screen is 1-bit!

So far, so good!

The fact that Keita Takahashi was on board was a big pull too. I tend to like even his least gamey games, and to my mind giving Takahashi a crank and saying “do what you want” is probably going to produce gold.

The core idea of “seasons” of games sounded great too. Basically the idea is that once you get a Playdate, two new games unlock every week on it until you eventually have 24 to play. That’s just season one.

But, recently, my mood changed. Playdate’s big video update last month had all the wit and charm I expected; these look like seriously lovely people making it. But the games on offer sound like they’re falling into the same trap as a lot of indies do. There was a lot of talk of narratives and telling stories and not a lot of focus on cool wee game ideas.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for storytelling in games, of course, but it just seemed like a lot of the highlighted developers missed part of the point of Playdate. As nice as its 1-bit screen is, I doubt `I want to read reams of twee indie text on it… wait a minute, it’s not backlit?!

I like that there’s a free to use game maker tool for Playdate, but it seems to exclusively be made for story-based games too.

Hmm, the more I thought about it, the more I realised the only things I were interested in through the entire presentation were Takahashi’s game and the wee thing the Obra Dinn guy made; and even he admits he’s just playing around with it and might not even be making something playable.