Season Two of the Playdate games have started arriving, and the first one I worked through is this lovely little archaeology title, where you dig down and find bones and… well, you do that a lot.

It reminds me a lot of SteamWorld Dig, although it isn’t a platformer and has (almost) no combat, but progression is similar. The deeper you dig, the more energy it takes to dig, so you buy upgrades (with money earned from things you’ve dug up) that give you more energy or let you dig more easily or deeper. Unlike SteamWorld Dig, it’s viewed from above rather than the side, so you have wider areas of things to uncover, and there’s a bit of a puzzle element as some rocks and things need to be fully uncovered before you can destroy them and dig underneath.

Another thing that is similar to SteamWorld Dig is the twist that I won’t be revealing. If you’ve played that game, then when you get to a certain point in this game you’ll realise the same thing!

It’s a pretty simple game, but there’s a moreish gameplay loop as you finish each run with usually just enough money to buy upgrades to get you just a little further next time. It’s clearly been tuned to keep you coming back, as every run seems to get you something new.

Lucas Pope, the developer of this game, has a reputation for making weird experimental games. But they’re also good. I’ll admit, however, that apart from some time on Papers, Please (I lost my save I think, following a reinstall or something) and the demo of Return of the Obra Dinn (which I fully intended to get the full version of but for some reason never did), I’ve not really experienced them. Until now!

Hyped as a possible killer-app for the silly little cranking handheld, Mars After Midnight sets you up as an alien guidance counsellor on Mars, who, along with their robot sidekick/slave/helper runs night classes for various other aliens with issues. Issues such as, they have cracked skulls, or are cyclopseses with anger issues, or they flinch or something. All Serious Issues.

So you organise these sessions, by advertising in the right areas of town, and make them successful by providing the best refreshments. Then, aliens turn up at the door and you have to screen them to ensure they’re suitable for the session you have running. For example, you can use an x-ray machine to see if they have a cracked skull, or can surprise them to see if they flinch. If they match, in they come, help themselves to food or drink (which you then usually have to tidy up because aliens are messy, it seems), and if you’ve done everything right, they’ll leave you a tip.

Eventually, you need use this money to buy a ticket to leave Mars, but you also need to spend it on equipment (like the x-ray machine) and refreshments, so it’s a long process.

It isn’t especially hard, and although it is superficially similar to Papers, Please it has a very different vibe. The crank controls are mostly just for opening and closing the door hatch and cleaning the food table, so nothing too tricky. There’s a surprising variety in the different counselling sessions and “detection” requirements, with one of my favourites being the one where you have to translate what the aliens are saying using a phrasebook.

Definitely worth a play, and was worth dusting off my sadly neglected Playdate for.

I may have been neglecting my Playdate of late. Mainly because it’s hard to see the screen when it isn’t sunny. However, Panic released a big update this week with a new on-device store and a couple more free games, so I had a look. And then ended up completing this.

It’s a fishing game (hence “Reel”) where you ride a hook down into a building, winching up and down with the crank, whilst avoiding magnets, lasers and drones. You collect money bags on the way, and then the main item of the level to nick (hence “Steal”) is at the bottom, which you hook and then winch back in again.

Actually doing this isn’t very hard. It doesn’t seem you can die or fail, as being lasered or whatever just bumps you off the hook but you can get picked back up again. The trickiness is doing it fast enough for a medal, without falling off the hook for another medal, and getting all the money for the third medal. I didn’t do all that, but I did steal all the target items and complete the story.

Nice, quirky, silly. Kind of like most Playdate games, I’ve found.

Yes, I have a Playdate! Finally! And yes, this is the first game I’ve completed on it!

Casual Birder is a little like that Bit Orchard or Toem in a way. It’s a sort of adventure game set in a town obsessed with taking photos of birds. The aim is to take part in a bird photography competition, but of course things are made difficult in a number of ways. For starters, some of the birds are a bit shy, or fast, or hide in the dark, so you must perform various tasks to make them photographable. Worse, is that the local yoofs have elected themselves as the gatekeepers of bird photography so you have to placate them before you’re allowed to enter the contest.

Taking photos is done by moving your camera’s viewfinder around the screen, but you usually need to focus the shot with the Playdate’s crank to get a perfect picture for your album. It’s not always obvious which way you’re supposed to wind, what with the photo subjects being tiny and a black and white screen not being the most useful way of showing depth so “blurring” is more “stippling”, but it’s not really a problem.

The game is filled with silly characters and events, and although short (90 minutes, tops, I’d say), it’s a nice little thing and certainly more in-depth and “proper game”-like than the other Playdate titles I’ve played so far.