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Raccoin (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Yes! Another incremental clicker game with Luck Be A Landlord/Balatro nods! This one isn’t anything to do with cards or trees though. No, it’s all set around a penny falls machine.

You put coins into it, that pushes coins out. Coins that come out earn you money. Somehow, you make money out of this – unlike a real one – because you have special coins that can be bought between rounds, are stored in an expandable clip, and do magic things. So you can get coins that are rabbits and then fox coins hunt them and increase your score. Or you can electrify coins, or have giant coins, or all sorts.

There’s also a combo meter, which builds as you push coins off the edge and is cancelled if you spend too long between doing so. Build it enough and you trigger a bonus wheel to spin, with “prizes” like more coins or massive towers of coins.

Like other games of this sort, it’s getting the right combination of special coins, a bit of timing, and a lot of luck that allows you to get higher and higher scores on each run. And, like other games of this sort, it’s pretty addictive. Raccoin isn’t as good as Luck Be A Landlord or Balatro, but it is decent enough.

PowerWash Simulator 2 (Steam 2): COMPLETED!

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You’d be hard-pressed, from the screenshots, to see that PowerWash Simulator 2 is actually a different game to PowerWash Simulator 1. And the gameplay too, in fact. After all, there are only so many different ways washing dirty stuff can be presented. Why, then, is this a whole new game and not just another pile of DLC for the original? Money? It’s probably money. Right?

There are differences, if you look closely. Perhaps the biggest, in terms of “gameplay” at least, is how they’ve done away with all the different types of soap. In the first game, different surface types required the purchase and use of specific detergents, so you’d need one for stone and one for metal and one for plastic and so on. Well, not only is there only one soap type now, it’s free and unlimited. Well, you can only have so much splashed on surfaces at any one time, but rinsing it off magically refills it to your washer so it is effectively infinite. This might not sound like much of a change but, in a game with very few possible changes, it’s a game, uh, changer.

I almost completely avoided using soap in the original, because of the cost and fiddly swapping it out and stuff, so cleaning took more “passes” than it could have done. Now, I foamed up everything with gay abandon. Game changer.

Another change is the addition of a new piece of equipment – the swing. You hang it from the top of a flat surface, and sit in it – giving you mostly free movement up, down, left and right to squirt much more easily than you would with ladders or the scaffolding. Both those, and the hilariously useless step-stool, return, but on specific levels the swing is an excellent new bit of kit. Could have really done with that on the tower at the fire station in the original.

There’s also a new plot. The dodgy Mayor is being dodgy, and the gems you recovered in the previous game that were required to keep the volcano in check have been stolen, but ultimately this just manifests as a reason to clean stuff, same as before.

The final change, which may well have been there before but I didn’t make use of it, was single console split screen co-op. I played on the Switch 2 so was disappointed it didn’t support the game share method of giving player 2 a Switch of their own to stream to, but it was still fun and, as you’d expect, halved the time it took to complete levels.

That’s all there is to say, really – it’s more of the same with a few quality of life improvements. Could it have been DLC? Probably. Should it? Well, chances are it’d have been about the same price anyway (I paid £15 for it, but the eShop price is £20) so it doesn’t really matter. It’s more relaxing zen washing, and it’s worth the entry fee, so I don’t actually care. Oh yeah, and there’s a toilet to wash. Winner.

Whitewater Wipeout: triple 360

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Whitewater Wipeout was one of the first games available on the Playdate, being released in the first week of Season 1, and I think it’s still my favourite on the system. It has the vibes of California Games, but with a clear end point, refined scoring system, and responsive and intuitive controls.

The front of the board goes where the crank is pointing. It is such an immediate piece of feedback that it gives you an innate sense of connection to the character, but the fact that you can turn the crank quicker than the board can turn makes it crucial to plan in advance when to stop your stunts. Being able to shift weight on the board as you launch, using up on the d-pad, gives even more depth to it.

It’s ideal for a handheld game too. Three lives; you lose one each time you land the wrong way or stray to the bottom of the screen. As you travel to the left, the wave slowly catches up with you unless you constantly move, and the further to the left you go the smaller the wave is – making it more difficult to launch and land tricks, and eventually forcing a wipeout. I’ve reached that last point once in all my games.

The top global scores are over 2 million, and I have no idea how they can be achieved – you would need to have a perfect run on each of your three lives, getting a triple and then quadruple 360 on every trick, building up the combo for the whole run, and hitting a few birds along the way. My top score is less than a quarter of that, and even that felt like I was lucky so many times throughout.

2025 Mosaic Retrospective (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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As I enjoyed Proverbs so much, of course I was going to download this, which is the same sort of puzzle game by the same developer. This time, instead of plague-era images depicting weird proverbs, it’s a collage of representations of events that happened in 2025. Some funny, some stupid, some sad.

I say “the same sort of puzzle game”, but I actually mean “it’s the same game but with different pictures”. Which is exactly what I wanted, so that’s fine, and as a bonus it is completely free. Unfortunately, it suffers from the Impossible To Use On A Steam Deck controls issue that Proverbs also had, but was just as easily fixed to work how I wanted it.

Minishoot’ Adventures (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Half way through the sentence where a reviewer described Minishoot’ Adventures as “The Legend of Zelda, only it’s a twin stick shooter” I’d already slammed the WANT button on the eShop. Yes, I know I could have bought it there and then (or at least pre-ordered it), but paying full price for any game, regardless of how good it is, just feels wrong. Often, I’ll put something on my wishlist and by the time it is in a sale I’ve totally lost all enthusiasm for it or, more frequently, totally forgotten what it was. But not this game. I checked the sales every week.

So I’ve finally managed to play it and it’s everything I wanted. You’re a little spaceship and you have to rescue other little spaceships and explore the world and the dungeons in it and fit baddies and big bosses, and get upgrades which improve your abilities or unlock new areas. There are some mazes, and puzzles, and somehow, somehow, despite the fact you shoot hundreds of bullets a minute and you look like something from Gradius, it’s still Zelda. Zelda with Geometry Wars gameplay. And it works.

The dungeons are fun and varied. The boss battles are a mix of wait-and-strike and bullet-hell. There are various sidequests, like finding engravings to expand the lore or racing a little fairy thing round a number of courses (where you can often cut corners, pleasingly), or collecting red crystals to use as currency to improve your shooting, speed or power. Getting every last item, trinket, and ticking off every last area on the map was addictive and I happily 100%ed the game.

More of this sort of thing, please!