Latest news with #FulcrumDefender
Metro
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Playdate Season 2 full review – the best games on the weirdest console
The black and white portable console with a hand crank as a controller has completed its second season and the games have proven just as odd as the hardware. The Playdate handheld, with its perfectly weighted crank and immaculate hardware design has been out for just over three years, and while it hasn't quite set the world on fire it definitely has plenty of devotees. At launch it came with a 'season' of 24 games that arrived as a drip feed of two per week, and made for a delightful introduction to the system, even if we never found ourselves playing any of them after the first few weeks. Season 2 is just over half the size, bringing you 12 games – along with Blippo+ which is more of an interesting curio than a game. Once again, the variety really impresses, with original and highly unusual games that are built for a system with significant and quite deliberate limitations. It's fascinating to see how developers adapt, and this season comes with some real highlights. Week 1 Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. As openers go, they don't get much braver than Blippo+, which isn't a game at all. It's a set of video streams supposedly from the planet Blipp, showcasing bizarre trashy cable TV type content of the sort that used to populate daytime telly in America in the 80s. It takes a while for streams to load on the Playdate, but the slightly grainy content somehow really suits the tiny device. Quite what it's attempting to convey we have to concede we never really figured out, although there are some common themes you start picking up as you watch more of its abject weirdery. Engineered around aiming using the crank, Fulcrum Defender is a circular and completely manual tower defence game from Subset Games, makers of FTL and Into The Breach. Unusually, you have to prevent various shapes, that fly in from the screen edges, from reaching the core in the middle. Enemies employ different flight paths and tactics to avoid your defensive fire, while your advantage comes from power-ups and special weapons, in a fast-paced and precise shooter whose trance beats help augment the sense of being in the zone. One of the most substantial of season 2's games, this has you playing palaeontologist, excavating dig sites in search of dinosaur bones and lore-conferring alien artefacts. Its clever use of black and white textures does a great job of representing the different strata you dig through, while upgrading everything from your shovel to bone-detecting sonar proves pleasantly addictive. An involving game that proves hard to put down once you're in the swing. Week 2 Riding Wheelsprung's tiny trials bike is an exercise in balance, throttle control, and braking to avoid obstacles and ensure you don't hit the ground with enough force to destroy your bike. Its 34 side-scrolling tracks swiftly become extremely challenging, with each requiring multiple attempts even to figure out which way to go and what approach you should take, let alone actually reaching the end. Deep, subtle, and physics-based, it demands dedication to reveal its charms. After an icy but unspecified cataclysm that's wiped out human civilisation, you trudge around its wreckage trying to eke out an existence scavenging through the snowy debris. As usual, the real horrors are other people, some of whom can be friendly but are often horribly bad news. Its melancholy tone and world-building, your character's reminiscences overlaid on your exploration, are punctuated by inventory puzzles and moments of savagery perpetrated by fellow survivors. Your ultra-slow walking pace and continual backtracking are in keeping with the mise en scène but can grate. Week 3 This crank-orientated animal catching game has you controlling a cat with a hoop. Your job is to swing it over an unwary creature and then rapidly turn the crank to encircle it, adding it to your inventory, and capturing multiple enemies if you time it right. Its mechanics and locomotion are unlike anything you're likely to have played before and take some getting used to, giving seasoned gamers a brief glimpse of what it must be like for non-gamers to pick up a controller for the first time. An accurate recreation of the 1987 game, Shadowgate, complete with single channel audio tunes and monochrome still frame graphics, played by selecting an action from a list, then moving the cursor to apply it to something on screen. It's an incredibly clunky control scheme, but it just about gets the job done. Even overlooking the inherent unwieldiness, it's almost unbelievably difficult, with obtuse puzzles that are seemingly immune to logic and instant death around every corner. By today's standards it's all but impossible and in the years before internet walkthroughs it's astounding that anyone could have worked out how to complete it. Week 4 You're an extendable dachshund, the crank stretching your sausage dog body to try and reach pieces of food, each of which makes you longer, a bit like old classic, Snake. The lengthier you get, the better your reach, letting you access previously inaccessible areas, then at the end of each level you crank out a dog egg whose size depends on how much you've managed to eat during your escapades. It's quite the oddity, if not the most compelling of this season's titles. Otto's Galactic Groove is a funky rhythm action game with the messy hip-hop spirit of Jet Set Radio, blended with the otherworldliness of Space Channel 5. Its story is purposely bizarre, even if its rhythm action is more or less as you'd expect, apart from a reliance on the crank to target the notes you tap. You'll also need to use it to hold sustained notes, which slope up and down, and in Extreme difficulty turn into improbable zig-zags that you'll need to track at speed. It features admirably eclectic musical styles, and you can really hear when you miss a beat. Week 5 To destroy the black holes threatening your planet you need to launch black holes of identical size to cancel them out. Adjust the diameter of each hole using the crank, aim and fire, the difference between the size of the one you shoot and the one you hit getting deducted from your health bar. You'll also need to avoid space tourists, amongst other obstacles, by bouncing black holes off the wall to target their harder to reach counterparts, in levels that sadly aren't all that much fun. This season's undoubted star is Taria & Cosmo, a 2D side-scrolling puzzle platform adventure about a girl and her grapple hook robot, which she can fire out and stick onto certain surfaces, letting her swing or suspend herself from them. You use the crank to aim the grapple, then once attached, lengthen and shorten the rope, letting you perform increasingly dazzling acrobatic moves as you get used to the unusual feel of traversal. Despite the small screen some of your antics feel elegant – majestic even – and its narrative is a searing satire of cold-hearted corporate control and the American medical system. More Trending Week 6 You're a small, two-armed turnip, exploring a sizeable map by climbing your way around it, the crank swinging one arm, then the other, as you grip and release. New skills you unlock open up new parts of the map, Metroidvania style, and just getting around is enough of a test on its own until you get the hang of it. You'll soon find yourself becoming more proficient, which is just as well given the lifts, pinball-style plungers, and rows of spikes you'll need to navigate as you explore, making frequent use of the map. Chance the dog's point 'n' click adventure is just under an hour's worth of novelty grade good luck/bad luck scenarios, that see its law-breaking canine anti-hero alternately tormented and rewarded by fate. Starting with a flat tyre and a lost mobile, that prevent him warning his gangster pals of their imminent arrest, he immediately falls down a manhole into the sewer, and that's just the start of his mini-calamities. Set in a city populated by talking dogs, cats and duck-billed platypuses, it makes good use not only of the crank, but also the Playdate's microphone and accelerometer. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: PlayStation sues Tencent over Horizon 'clone' Light Of Motiram MORE: Lewis Hamilton admits he's cancelling work just to play new video game MORE: 90s Nintendo classic Mario Paint is now on Switch 2 with mouse controls
Engadget
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Playdate Season 2 review: The Whiteout and Wheelsprung
Panic is not messing around with Playdate's second season. After starting off Season Two on the right foot with Dig! Dig! Dino! , Fulcrum Defender and the surprise rollout of Blippo+ , the team has followed through with another strong pair of games for week two. The Whiteout and Wheelsprung are, like the week one games, polar opposites of each other: a somber, narrative-heavy post-apocalyptic adventure and a nutty dirtbike game with realistic(ish) physics. If you're looking for any throughline between them, I've got you. It's squirrels. You'll see. (Alright I may be reaching, but as both a journalist and a wildlife rehabilitator who is currently raising orphaned squirrels, just let me have this one). This week also brought an update for the "intergalactic TV service," Blippo+ , and it looks like we'll be getting new content for some time to come. The Season Two team wrote in an email accompanying the latest drop that " Blippo+ itself is going to update every week for eleven (!) weeks, every Thursday at 10AM PT [1PM ET]." Once it's all over, there will be reruns. We'll get a countdown for that on week 12, the team says. Now, let's get into the new games. Minutes into playing Scenic Route Software's The Whiteout, I became certain that this was going to be another game that would make me cry. The narrative tone is heavy, the atmosphere is bleak and absolutely nothing about it suggests that anything is going to get better… ever. It feels hopeless from the start, but you have to keep trudging along anyway. (If you've ever read The Road , the feeling should be familiar). When I finally reached the end, though, I wasn't in tears — I was totally speechless, in a "mouth hanging open, empty inside" kind of way. It's stunning. The Whiteout is narrative driven, picking up in a barren post-apocalyptic version of the US in which a snowstorm began one spring and never stopped. The events are set in current times — the onset of the snow occurred in spring 2025 — giving it an eerie, close to home kind of quality. Everything about it feels like something that could happen. As you play through its five chapters, the story is told through the playable character's musings about the past and present. It's all beautifully written, with numerous sentimental moments that felt genuinely heartbreaking. It did manage to get a few smiles out of me though; the character makes cynical quips here and there, and a nefarious bunch called The Woodpeckers comes to be known simply as "the 'peckers," which got me every time. And the appearance of a squirrel just kind of hanging out in the background served as a refreshing sign of life amid the desolation. (I wondered while playing if the squirrel was a checkpoint, but I'd have to go through it all again to figure that out for sure.) The gameplay entails mostly linear exploration, searching for resources, solving puzzles and making choices about your next moves. There's not much in the way of action, and you spend most of the game just walking with a slowness that is at times maddening. But, while I definitely would have appreciated the option to speed up even a little (a gentle jog, maybe?), the lethargy helps to illustrate how hard it would be to carry on in such conditions. Backtracking several times to get all the resources you need to progress in some areas is painfully tedious, so the relief when you do complete the action is real. Patience is key in this game. I fear some people will give up on this title early because of the pace, and I implore you not to do that. It's worth every minute. It's also worth it to play with headphones, as recommended, to really let yourself be immersed in the setting. I stayed up half the night playing and got up early the next morning to finish it, and I'm still thinking about the ending I came to. There are multiple endings according to the creators, so I'll likely dive back in for another go once I've had more time to digest. The Whiteout is without a doubt the most memorable game of both Playdate seasons to date. Nino van Hooff & Julie Bjørnskov So, you played The Whiteout and now you're depressed. The Playdate team seems to have prepared for this, because the other game that dropped this week with the second release of Season Two may as well be the antidote. Wheelsprung is cute, charming and silly as hell. It's also a pretty challenging (and frustrating) physics game, but I do love a game that pisses me off a little. The art of Wheelsprung is instantly recognizable as that of Julie Bjørnskov, one of the creators of Escape the Boardgame and Escape the Arcade , which is to say it's oozing whimsy. Bjørnskov made this one with programmer Nino van Hooff. The story is pretty simple: a family with a child who loves nuts — like, enough to scatter them all over the place in joy — has briefly left their home unattended, and you're a squirrel equipped with an absurdly flexible dirtbike who is on a mission to collect as many nuts as possible in their absence. There are nearly three dozen levels to complete, each of them an obstacle course you must figure out how to navigate on the two-wheeler. There's also a level editor to create your own tracks. The squirrel's dirtbike is basically a Dr. Seuss contraption, and it's capable of some pretty impressive maneuvers. Lean in either direction using the D-pad and it can do a wheelie. Hit the down arrow and it'll instantly turn you to face the other way. But you must always be conscious of your balance. Allowing the squirrel's helmet to so much as tap an obstacle will result in a run-ending wipeout, as of course will all-out crashing. This game forces you to get extremely creative to traverse complicated tracks. There's a leaderboard and ideally you want to finish with the fastest time possible, but for a handful of levels my main goal at first was just figuring out how to make it to the end at all. I don't want to give away too many hints about how to excel in this game, but I sure have spent a surprising amount of time driving my bike upside down dangling from one wheel, or rocking the bike back and forth to creep forward like an inchworm. It is absolutely ridiculous, and lots of (somewhat rage-inducing) fun.
Engadget
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Playdate Season 2 review: Fulcrum Defender, Dig! Dig! Dino! and Blippo+
Playdate Season Two is here, bringing with it two new games for the quirky yellow handheld every week until July 3. And if the first two titles are any indication of what this season will be like, it's sure to be a great one. Season Two kicked off on May 29 with the arcade action game Fulcrum Defender — from the studio behind FTL: Faster Than Light and Into the Breach — and the delightfully chill Dig! Dig! Dino! . The two games couldn't be more different from each other, but they're both bangers in their own right. Panic also released Blippo+ , which can only be described as a fever dream of cable TV, with the first drop of Season Two, and it is amazingly bizarre. "Survive for 10min!" sounded almost like a threat when I first started reading through Fulcrum Defender 's How To Play guide. Between all the on-screen information you need to pay attention to, the many different types of enemies that'll be attacking and the various weapon upgrades you can earn over the course of a run, there's a lot to take in, and I braced myself for a tense and complicated playing experience. But, while that may be closer to the case on Hard Mode, I found that Fulcrum Defender wasn't all that punishing of a shooter on Normal Mode. It's a challenge, for sure, but one with a surprisingly achievable goal that I was able to enjoy without losing my mind. At least, not until crossing the 10-minute mark. After that, all hell breaks loose. In Fulcrum Defender , you're positioned at the center of a circular arena and have to fend off a continuous swarm of enemies. Your shield will take damage any time an enemy collides with it, and once enough have breached that zone, it's game over. To avoid that, you need to shoot them down one by one, using the crank to aim your weapon and the D-pad to shoot. Some enemies can be taken out in one shot, but others — distinguished by their filled-in appearance — require multiple shots. Over time, you'll earn weapon upgrades to build out a more powerful defense system, with options like large, guided projectiles and a flail that can knock out several enemies in one sweep. It's unexpectedly addicting. The music is beautiful and calming, giving the whole thing a pleasant atmosphere despite the fact that you're surrounded by enemies at any given moment and trying not to die. Once I realized it was absolutely possible to survive 10 minutes and even go beyond that, I got sucked into the loop of trying over and over to beat my high scores. I'd love to see a global leaderboard for this game at some point, because I just know I'd be floored by how long some players will be able to last. If you liked this one and want to know a little more about the making of it, be sure to check out our interview with Jay Ma , the co-founder of Fulcrum Defender developer Subset Games. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing right now than pretending to be a paleontologist and casually digging for bones. No thoughts, just dig. That's exactly what Dig! Dig! Dino! has going on, and it's awesome. You're working as part of a crew (made up entirely of anthropomorphic animals) at the site of some really unusual dinosaur fossils, and it's your job to dig up new bones and artifacts. Once you've got the entire skeleton of a particular dinosaur, you can scan it in the lab to reveal what it was like when it was alive. That information, coupled with the peculiar artifacts scattered around the site, paints a picture of some pretty strange activities that went on there long ago. For example, some of these dinosaurs seem to have had crystals growing out of their bodies, and it looks like they were warned about the asteroid extinction event. Fishy! The gameplay is extremely low stakes — this is one for when you just want to zone out playing something that'll keep your hands busy. You're equipped with a shovel, a drill and a radar gadget for detecting items beneath the surface, and have no time-sensitive goals to hit. You only have so much energy, though, which will be consumed with each use of your tools. When you run out, the round is over. But you can visit each site as many times as you need to in order to find all of the dinosaur pieces hidden there, so it can be a really casual undertaking if you want it to be. It's a really nice time, with a fun story to tie it all together. You'll get a solid few hours of playtime out of this, too, and the simplicity of it all means you can put it down and come back to it later without having to rack your memory to figure out where you left off. I loved this one. What can one even say about Blippo+ ? This bizarre "1-bit television" experience came as a bonus with the first Season Two games, and it is something. Panic first teased it back in December 2024 as a Steam title, but here it is for the Playdate now, complete with a roster of channels playing hallucinatory programs and Femtofax, an interactive message board of sorts where you can find affirmations, neighborhood drama, chatter among amateur astronomers and more. Panic describes it as being "comparable to an old episode of The Twilight Zone ," but it's more like an old episode of The Twilight Zone if it were made by Tim & Eric and aired after midnight on Adult Swim. I think I am obsessed with it? I'm really interested to see where this goes. It'll keep getting new content alongside the rest of the Season Two releases, with new episodes every week for 12 weeks. I would totally park my Playdate in a dock (but not the Stereo Dock </3) on my desk and leave Blippo+ running in the background all day if it has enough fresh material to sustain it. The song playing alongside the endlessly scrolling Blippo+ TV guide screen is already stuck in my head, and I don't hate it. The program guide with this week's schedule is online, if you're curious about what's going on right now.
