Playdate Review

Panic spent years publishing other people's games, Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game among them, then had Teenage Engineering design a handheld the size of a coaster and shipped it. The Playdate has a 400 by 240 reflective screen with no backlight and no color at all, a d-pad, two buttons, and a crank that folds out of the right edge. Nothing about the specification is competitive and none of it is meant to be.

What you get instead is Season One, twenty four commissioned games that arrive two a week for twelve weeks, which turns the first three months of ownership into something closer to a magazine subscription than a console launch. The best of them treat the crank as an instrument rather than a gimmick: Crankin's Time Travel Adventure, by the designer of Katamari Damacy, is played entirely by winding time forward and back, and Lucas Pope's Mars After Midnight, which arrived two years later, is a small masterpiece about doorway bureaucracy.

The catalogue has kept growing, sideloading is officially supported and the development kit is free, so the thing does not run dry. The screen is the catch. In a dim room it is close to unreadable, and the price went from $179 to $199 while the hardware stayed where it was. Buy it as an object you will pick up on a train in daylight. Do not buy it as a console.