The aesthetic is notable, a sleek yellow device that fits in your hand and that you can hold in an even less cumbersome way than you hold your phone. Released with the kind of exclusivity and availability rate as a Nike sneaker, or more comparably, any of Analogue’s products. I didn’t get it at first. I had a strong affinity for Panic, of course, because of their association with Untitled Goose Game, Thank Goodness You’re Here, but most notably, from years before: Firewatch. With an even better track record of publishing games than Annapurna Interactive (rest in peace), Panic getting into producing not only hardware, but niche hardware at that felt like they were selling membership to an exclusive club that I, a fan of indie games, would never get to participate in, but as I kept thinking about it and seeing people post about it, the device seemed increasingly more charming.

The first time I put my hands on a Playdate was on an emulator. Browsing itch.io the year after the Playdate’s release in 2022 made me feel like I was missing something not only in the moment I was missing it, but that the feeling was permanent; that I would never get to know. Obviously playing any Playdate game on an emulator prevents you from engaging with the main feature of the handheld, the crank, which I will go into detail later.

If you’ve never heard of the Playdate before, it looks like this:

Notice the crank on the side, and I can say, as a now owner of the Playdate, it is not a gimmick. It is as essential as the display is to the Switch, or maybe the best feature of the Switch is its portability, but I digress. Without putting your hands on it, I will admit that it is borderline impossible to sell another person on both the mindblowing utilization of the crank, as well as the tangible satisfaction of ‘cranking it’ for lack of technically a better term, but a funny one nonetheless. Even writing this, I am faced with this small regret that the vast majority of people who play video games, but specifically, even the people who enjoy small indie games (small here not intended as a disparaging term, but as a classification for the type of indie game on the Playdate) will never get to experience the utter joy of both the Playdate itself and the games on it.

After I bought a Playdate, the people I showed it to were less than impressed by both the price (about $200) as well as the size and nature of games on it. If you buy the Playdate (which I definitely recommend), I would encourage you to engage with it on its own terms because that’s what it requires. The one thing holding Playdate back from its own success is the boring and incurious idea that a handheld console has to be powerful and capable of playing “games”: the type of games that “gamers” play. Bliss is on the other side of any individual’s opposition to the Playdate in any and every form. As unwilling as any Call of Duty player would be to admit that a game like Root Bear is fun, what they don’t know is that Root Bear will hit the same part of their synapses that go off as rounding the corner and popping off the shotgun at an enemy.

Video games are experiences that feel good, and while there is genre preference, the brilliance of the Playdate is that the experiences feel universal, like they’re tapping into a specific joy that is not mitigated by preference or limited by ability, or even understanding.

The first game in the series of games that comes with the Playdate is called ‘Casual Birder’, an experience where you play a boy taking pictures of birds to complete objectives and satisfy NPCs. It is a wonder to play. It asks so little of you and yet offers you so much in return. I struggle to find words to describe these games because the simplicity of the experience is the point and yet, there is so much to say. Walking around town looking for birds invokes play in its purest sense, accentuated by looking at a small screen, using the crank to locate and photograph the birds that you find. Even in my first experience, I realized why the crank was essential; the importance of the how your hands move affects the game more than holding your hand in a static position for hours at a time like any controller or keyboard would ask of you. The Playdate asks you to ‘play’ with both it and the game you’re playing.

If you have any affinity for indie games, keep an eye on the Playdate and play it if you ever get a chance. I guarantee you will not regret it.

Into the Grid offers you a journey through a series of nodes. The word node here is particularly applicable because the aesthetic invokes a futuristic hellscape iterating on Netrunner, a now defunct card game that involves hackers penetrating corporate firewalls to better the good of the city, and I suppose world at large, but I never had a full grasp of the story.

I’m not very good at these kinds of games so there is a sense in which I am not the ideal audience for this game, but as any critical thinker may know that doesn’t preclude me from thinking about it critically and or sharing my thoughts on it.

The aforementioned aesthetic is the strongest part of the game making you present in a digital environment that is claustrophobic making your ego smaller even though you’re sitting in front of a computer screen in the comfort of your room. The nodes are difficult to get to, they require calculated decision-making, and stress; the stress comes in the form of a mechanic called Trace, a term that been used before in Cyberpunk fiction. It read to me as Trace in two senses, firstly the obvious which is that you, the player, are being followed, or being traced in the sense of the word as a verb. The second though is more interesting, which is the noun trace, a path you leave behind, a sense that you’re being followed, or more simply, the stress.

The stress is the friction pushing you to feel rushed even though there is no timer and you have theoretically infinite time to make each decision, but the pressure to move forward is present. Obviously there’s the tendency to want to play at a fairly steady place when playing any game for the sake of your own time, but experiencing the clustered waypoints of Into the Grid leaves you feeling pressured to move forward to your objective because of the trace; because you don’t want to be traced, both as a player, but also as the character you play. You feel a responsibility to the avatar in your hands making sure that they don’t leave a trace per your actions, a guilt that motivates a lot of games that have one chance to succeed before you lose everything and start over.

The enemies you face are autonomous robots set on shooting at you, preventing you from penetrating the firewall of the corporation that we can only assume has committed some evil did. You are for lack of a better phrase, going into the grid, the den, the invocation of fear, and the hope at the end of your desired success.

It doesn’t feel like a mission in a traditional sense, a goal just to be completed for the sake of progress; the mission is the game. This is the pressure. You have one chance to do this or you fail, not only yourself, but humanity’s ability to survive the onslaught of the violent autonomy of your soulless metal machines programmed to uphold greed and corporate evil.

Combat consists of cards, or as I like to think of them, choices. As is typical in these kinds of experiences, three choices can be made, a common number, most famous in baseball, three leaves you with an interesting series of choices. The first choice is the gamble, the second choice is the reassurance, and the third choice is the finality; the second choice being the most difficult to make. The gamble is obvious because the choice itself often belies being made first; you are being asked to make the best choice for your own sake as a player, but again, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of the existence of all which your last ditch effort is set to save. The second choice, reassurance, is in a sense doubling down on the first choice, the follow-up to a decision that was practically necessary, but in the second choice is a risk, that in essence, you force the last choice to be made in a specific way, the follow-up to the follow-up has practically been decided before it’s made. As the decisions compound, the first and the last turn become guaranteed to make the most optimal choice. The reassurance is the choice that has to follow the first one and has to set up the last one. These choices are what you do when you go into the grid. If you stumble upon the ability to make another choice, you are flooded with relief for an instant, the instant before the instant where you realize the additional choice doesn’t relieve the feeling of the insurmountable pressure facing you down the barrel of a sleek, factory-crafted, independently operated execution. The additional choice is more stressful because you are again faced with the choice of everything that became for or after depending on when you are given it. The best part of drawing from a deck of choices is that you do not know what’s coming. You build your series of choices over time, yes, but the choices clash as you are faced with a set of choices that is not even close to infinite, suggesting a very finite set of timelines, or rather a predetermined outcome.

The outcome in which the corporation you are so desperately fighting is attempting to lock you into pre-determined destiny and you are left having to break out of the linearity in front of you. The cold, narrow lane of an unthinking person with no options, or more likely a complete lack of awareness that other options being exist. The authoritarian attempt to warp each entity into a mass of flesh singularity lacking free will, living a life in which you, like the autonomous robots built committing violence on their behalf, are nothing more than a blood packet doing the same thing the robots are doing, technically containing a soul, but with no ability to use it are left essentially without one.

You are presented with an ability to add to your lexicon of options, uniquely so, you are burdened with the pressure of having to make the right ones and this tension is palpable and invigorating. It has so much less to do with the increasing amount of choices decided by luck and more to do with the experience of making these choices that enables you to make better ones. You are the embodiment of a microscopic linearity and with each choice, you gain wisdom allowing you to stray from the firmness of the line you were expected to follow, straying further from the path each time yearning for the day that you will break free from that linearity and all humanity in kind.

And it could all end, it could all come to a screeching halt, a taste of retribution ripped away as hope dies in a flash and then appears again as soon as it all goes black. This is the nature of experiences like this; a pressing need to move forward equal in importance to a pressing need to die. Every time you die, you get to start over, begin anew with the knowledge gained from before. Whether or not you are called for another attempt, your wisdom is gained no matter what. Even if you never play the game again, you are given the gift of wisdom you can never return, an ever-pressing memory yours and your character’s in the face of all that is good.