Review: Playdate earns its $179 price tag with cute design, memorable games [Updated]

The lovable, transportable, and banana yellow $179 Playdate console is now transport to its first batch of preorder prospects, so we’re now free to overview the quirkiest gaming system in years.

Because of chip shortages and normal manufacturing chaos, shopping for Playdate is way much less enjoyable than utilizing it. In the event you preordered the system in July 2021 after studying my hands-on preview, nice. In the event you waited for a correct overview like this one, nevertheless, count on a backorder queue of no fewer than eight months. (At the least Panic say it’s going to make as many Playdates as folks need to purchase, as a substitute of pulling an NES Classic and limiting production.)

To those that ran with my previous optimism about Playdate’s squat form factor, quirky games, and unique crank control system, I’m glad to report that I did not lead you astray—as long as you heeded my particular bias. As I wrote in July:

I am a fan of experimental, quick-fire indie fare, which the Playdate is clearly tailor-made towards. This most frequently means lo-fi point-and-click adventures, arcadey score-chasers, and quirky platformers—both with a crank or with out. If that feels like a contemporary breath of air—probably akin to the earliest days of devs exploiting the novelty of touchscreens on both the earliest iPhone or the unique Nintendo DS—then Panic’s {hardware} and software program ecosystem will maintain up their finish of the discount to affirm your bias.

That preview got here after testing simply 4 of the system’s included video games. This week, I can extra totally reply the query of what Playdate delivers for $179, together with a take a look at all 24 of its “first season” video games.

Panic’s earliest Playdate gross sales pitch included the “shock issue” of two new video games unlocking every week for 12 weeks. In the event you’re shopping for Playdate to benefit from the ritual of tearing off digital wrapping paper and revealing surprises on a weekly foundation, this overview merely summarizes what you may count on from the system’s included video games. Consider it like selecting up wrapped presents and shaking them a number of instances.

In the event you’d reasonably know precisely what $179 buys you after 12 weeks, I’ve damaged out game-specific mini-reviews into a separate report. That report clarifies what number of weeks you will have to attend for every recreation to unlock, as nicely.

I hope you will come away figuring out whether or not Playdate is your excellent boutique transportable or whether or not you would be happier investing $179 into one thing like a Raspberry Pi, an Analogue Pocket, or a Steam Deck.

Diminutive but nonetheless principally wonderful

Whereas studying my mixture of reward and criticism, needless to say I’ve a super Playdate proprietor in thoughts: a wide-eyed, world-questioning pre-teen, anticipating a wide range of transportable, accessible gaming experiences that mix basic gameplay ideas and foolish textual content with reckless, crank-fueled abandon. (This may occasionally additionally apply to the wide-eyed pre-teen inside many people.)

Although it is a “closing” overview, it recaps a lot of what I already wrote about the “near final” hardware in July 2021. By way of bodily kind issue and normal usability, Playdate then is seemingly equivalent to Playdate now.

Which means: I’ve by no means seen a light-weight recreation system with this mix of consolation, management precision, and display readability that additionally manages to run easy video games easily. Its transportable gaming prowess is unsurprising, as the music-gadget wizards at Teenage Engineering are behind a lot of Playdate’s design. I am cool with the compromises required to squeeze a lot into so little, however consumers ought to preserve these compromises in thoughts.

Enjoying the whole “first season” of 24 included Playdate video games hasn’t modified my normal impression of the system; as a substitute, it jogged my memory that there is solely a lot consolation house owners can count on from a 3×3 inch (74×74 mm) system. As I beforehand wrote:

Playdate matches neatly in an adult-sized palm, which could lead you to count on claw-hand woes when you maintain it with two fingers (suppose Nintendo’s Sport Boy Micro). Panic avoids this pitfall with a number of essential design-language methods, together with thinness (9 mm), lightness (3.03 oz / 86 g), and enough width. Mix these three components, and the system lands in grownup fingers with out requiring awkward weight bracing.

So the Playdate will get away with a clean, rubberized end like the outside of a vinyl toy. This by no means feels “mild and low-cost”—since that lightness and cheapness are essential to its handheld gaming consolation. As an alternative of together with gamepad-like curves that match into fingers, the Playdate buttresses its 4 corners with delicate curves, and these roll throughout a palm fairly comfortably.