If “Hades but with friends” has always been your dream you’ll probably enjoy what you play. It’s difficult, and there’s never a moment of downtime, unless you have a friend who overthinks every upgrade choice, in which case, buckle up.

Character options are born of classic RPG classes but with distinct style. I enjoyed playing Aurena, a melee support class with a high skill cap, the “Expelled Sage of the Lunar Conclave of Arcanum”. She can temporarily sacrifice health to deal damage and heal allies.

With each map having five to ten stages of enemies, it can be difficult to know if you’re exploring enough before daring to fight each boss. After each stage, prepare to ready up and then remind your friend to get ready. In the beginning, the stages go by quickly and it feels like too much time not fighting but rather deciding where to travel next. Sometimes the stages have random features, for example, a well which allows you to spend dust (the game’s currency) to upgrade your abilities or gems (augments to your abilities), but both can feel underwhelming.

Completing each stage rewards you with an ability or gem for upgrading abilities. This part of the game really shines, and it’s fun to combine effects for an increasingly powerful and devastating blow, but often I feel like my best move is the power-up my class-provided abilities and it removes what could be interesting trade-offs. The nature of having every ability available for every class, and every upgrade available for every ability leaves me missing the exciting moments when you find the perfect upgrade which are far more memorable. Instead, I end up just upgrading one ability more than everything else, often the one included in my class from the start or a rare ability better than the rest, then spamming that with a few extra doo dads that barely do anything.

After beating the demo a second time, I spent my measly 60 stardust on a few breadcrumbs of upgrades, then looked further up the progression tree to see nothing enticing. Lizard Smoothie has something here, but it’s lacking. It needs better class based meta-progression, alternate starting abilities (a la Risk of Rain 2) and different ways to play the classes, and better boss design. The bosses are pretty good, the pace exciting, the difficulty’s well-tuned. But I worry that if Lizard Smoothie don’t include more variety, players will get bored quickly. I need something more than dodging red circles on the ground. I wonder how many players will die on the first boss as the difficulty ramps up compared to the trivial enemies before. Now I wonder how they will design bosses strong enough to make them feel engaged again.

Is Shape of Dreams good enough to carry its own weight on its own two feet? Good enough to wrestle away an audience from an increasingly competitive multiplayer roguelike market?

Good luck, Lizard Smoothie

And I mean that in the most genuine way possible.

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.