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.