The best Playdate games for 2024

A Balanced Brew is one of those games that feels like it really captures the essence of the Playdate. It is simple, quirky and way more challenging than it first seems. You play as a man with a handlebar mustache who is in desperate need of his morning coffee, and there’s only one way he can travel to get it: by unicycle, obviously. Using the crank, it’s your job to safely deliver him to the coffee cart (where the good coffee is), being careful to keep him perfectly balanced so he doesn’t wipe out.

There’s a lot working against you — gravity, uneven roads, mud, pooping birds — and it quickly becomes an addicting grind to beat your own personal bests. A Balanced Brew is a great one for anyone who enjoyed Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure from Season One. And there are tons of coffee puns to appreciate throughout.

If shoot ‘em ups are your thing, do not skip the Playdate bullet hell that is Angel Pop. It’s an arcade-style shmup with cute visuals, adaptive difficulty levels that change as you play and a relentless onslaught of projectiles to dodge. The bullet patterns themselves are hypnotic, if you can take a moment to notice them while you’re trying not to die. You can play this one using the crank to control the direction of your fire, which is my preferred method, but there’s also the option to use the d-pad and A/B buttons.

Root Bear is another quintessential Playdate game, for reasons I only recently came to understand. In Root Bear, you are the bartender in charge of a root beer tap and you have to pour sodas just right to appease the clientele of a bunch of dramatic bears. Your success relies on precision crank-work — screw up their orders, and the bears won’t pay you well. They also may start screaming. It is so unserious, but engaging nonetheless. It’ll have you chasing high scores, but also chasing the smug satisfaction of showing those bears that you can pour a decent drink, thank you very much.

Mars After Midnight makes a cozy experience out of something that should feel tedious: cleaning up the refreshments table after a group therapy session before the next meeting begins. Not only are you the one-person (one-alien?) cleanup crew, but you’re also in charge of screening prospective Martian attendees to make sure they really belong. How do you determine such a thing? Well, for the Gnat Knife Handling session, you’ll want to only allow in knife-wielding gnats. For the Farty Party, everyone should be… uh, farting. You get the gist, I hope.

It’s very silly, but not too silly to detract from its charm. As a worker at The Off-Colony Community Support Center, you’re just trying to make as much money in donations as possible to support the facility and, in turn, Martians in need. You must promote its services to ensure residents in all sections of the settlement know about it, and you need certain resources to make these meetings worthwhile. None of these things are free. Mars After Midnight is a unique game that is perfect for the Playdate, making use of the crank but also requiring coordinated button-pressing to control your tentacle arms.

Summit takes platforming to the extreme, and will have you problem-solving nonstop to avoid dangerous obstacles and fatal falls as you climb painstakingly to the top of the mountain. It’s the kind of game that can really piss you off — expect to die hundreds of times over the course of a full playthrough. At least, that’s how it went for me on my first try (432 deaths!). Like Celeste, a game it bears much resemblance to, Summit will show you an exact death count.

The levels are cleverly designed and the background music is entrancing. Summit is surprisingly emotional, too, and bits of its story are revealed progressively as you reach higher and higher altitudes. You can play it all the way through in 1-2 hours, though I bet there are more skilled gamers who can do it in less.

Touch Egg may be one of the oddest games available for the Playdate right now. In this high score chaser, you use the crank to extend a freakishly long finger and poke an egg over and over and over — but there’s a creepy man standing in the room with you, and he does not want you to touch the egg. So you can only do it when his eyes are closed.

It’s equal parts bizarre, hilarious and compelling. Each run is 60 seconds, so it’s great for when you just want something quick to pick up here and there. It’s also a good one to pass between friends, so you can compete over who gets in the most egg touches. But be warned: it’s easy to get hooked.

Reel-istic Fishing probably isn’t like any other fishing game you’ve played before. Yes, you cast your line and then use the crank to reel it in, but the job isn’t done once you’ve hooked the fish. There’s an absurd second step: after reeling in your catches, you then have to harpoon them out of the sky. It’s a really goofy take on the classic fishing simulator, and a lot of fun.

All the species of fish you caught are logged in the Fincyclopedia, and you can use your earnings to upgrade your boat and equipment at the shop, which is run by a fish in disguise. There are a lot of peculiar little details to take in, and the music is very relaxing.

There are a few great dungeon crawlers out there for the Playdate, but Under the Castle is particularly charming. You play as a hero wearing a very large hat who must free a village from the grips of the Evil Lord. There are three dungeon areas where you’ll carry out your quests: the crypts, the sewers and the mines. In each, you’ll have a different purpose. In one, it’s killing enemies. In the others, it’s saving the enslaved villagers and collecting the Orbs of Light.

Under the Castle is impressively detailed, and it has one of my favorite crank mechanics yet: by cranking, you can disappear into the huge hat to hover over gaps. In Normal Mode, you’ll lose any items you picked up during a run if you die, but your dungeon progress will stay as is. Hard Mode brings permadeath.

The Tetris formula never gets old, and Pullfrog Deluxe puts an especially fun twist on the classic block puzzle. For one, there’s a cute frog. In Pullfrog, you have to use the frog’s sticky tongue to grab onto the blocks as they fall and arrange them properly. You can break the blocks by repeatedly striking them with the tongue, too, to make things fit more nicely. And using the crank, you can make the blocks fall faster. It might sound simple, but it’s a lot harder than it seems once everything starts moving. You can only pull, not push — and if the blocks fall on the frog, you’re dead.

As you successfully clear horizontal rows of blocks, you’ll earn powerups like the ability to double jump or a longer tongue. There are little eyeballs embedded in some blocks as well, which bring their own secrets that’ll be revealed as you progress.

If you like Vampire Survivors, you should definitely give Core Fault a try. You play as a mining drone who is tasked with digging for a resource, Cores, on an alien planet. But the area you’re exploring is overrun with eldritch creatures who do not want you there, so you’ll constantly be fighting them off. The further down you go, the more overwhelming they become. There’s a lot adding to the challenge of Core Fault’s central mission — you control the droid’s motion using the crank only, and all of your weapons are auto-fired, meaning you have to rely on their timing to defend yourself.

There are progressive upgrades that will make you more powerful against the enemies as you pass each level, but the enemies themselves will be stronger and more abundant the deeper you go.

You’re Gonna Miss the Bus! is an extremely addictive endless runner that throws so many obstacles at you it’s a wonder you can make it anywhere at all. It’s your mission to get little Henry to the school bus on time, but Henry’s town apparently has no sidewalk obstruction laws. As you run, you’ll have to jump over benches, flower pots, toys, garbage bags, delivery robots, tree roots, huge cracks… you get the point. There are also aerial obstacles that you’ll have to slide under or poor Henry will smack his head. You can play in Normal Mode, in which you’ll have a few lives and can continue your run after a couple of mistakes, or One-Shot, where you not only have one life, but the obstacles are on steroids. It’s a great time, I promise.

The Playdate Catalog has a pretty decent assortment of adventure games that will keep you busy for a couple of hours, and The Keyper is the perfect introduction to that world. You play as the newly appointed caretaker of an apartment building called the Winchester 21. Unfortunately, you don’t have any of the keys you need to access different parts of the building, so you have to hunt around for them. As you explore, you’ll meet a bunch of interesting characters and uncover what secrets (and gossip) they’ve been holding onto.

The Keyper has a good mix of story and puzzles, and manages to be both dark and funny at times. By the end, it becomes unexpectedly sentimental. Was the real treasure the friends we made along the way? You’ll have to play to find out.

Eyeland is a cute adventure-puzzle game that’s best played straight through in one sitting. It only takes about an hour to complete. The main character is a small blob who lives in isolation on an island and one day finds there’s no way to leave. Then one night, in a dream, the island mysteriously expands and you have to help the blob find its way back out to the normal world. Eyeland is a simple but beautiful game that’s heavy on atmosphere, with a few clever puzzles and quirky characters to round it out. If you want to dip your toes into the Playdate Catalog with something that’s short but packs a lot of heart, this is a good place to start.

In You Cannot Go Back, every choice you make is critical. You are in a dungeon, trying to escape, but the rooms are all booby-trapped. There are clues hidden throughout, some of them more subtle than others, and these will help you determine the correct way to proceed. That includes numerical patterns to figure out, symbols to remember and brief flashes of light highlighting the safe order of steps to take. You can only go up, down or forward — as the name implies, there’s no going back.

This game uses the d-pad and it’s recommended you flip the Playdate on its side to play in the portrait orientation. It’s a really unique experience and will put your brain to work a bit. Each run is pretty short, lasting only a few minutes, and the levels are randomly generated so you can play it over and over.

The Playdate Catalog isn’t exactly brimming with horror titles just yet, but there are a few spooky gems in there and Penrose is among the most memorable. Penrose is a beautiful, haunting nostalgia trip that sees you trying to guide the player character out of a mostly abandoned town. There are strange beasts, a disturbing living mall with cheekily named stores and a catacombs puzzle that’s just a little infuriating until you’ve figured it out. It’s relatively short, and there are a few different endings you can run into depending on the choices you make.

I loved the art style in this, and there’s a mix of heaviness and dark humor that really struck a chord with me, as I imagine it would for anyone who looks back on their past with a complicated mix of longing and revulsion — especially millennials who grew up in the suburbs and spent a lot of time hanging around at malls and doing delinquent things at the park.

Four Corners really caught me off guard with how addicting it is. This game seems so simple: there are a hundred squares arranged in a grid, and you have to create rectangles by linking four squares of the same color, each acting as one corner of the rectangle. Creating a rectangle will clear all the squares within its boundaries, earning you points and helping you progress to the next level. But you’re racing against the clock, and spotting the possible rectangle arrangements once all those white, black and gray squares are laid out next to each other suddenly isn’t so easy when you’re under the gun.

I expected this to be a laid-back, matching sort of puzzle game but it ended up getting my heart rate up. And I could not put it down. There’s also an announcer that will start counting down when you’ve only got a few seconds left, which really adds to the anxiety, but what really gets me is how it’ll cheer you on when you made a particularly impressive combo, making remarks like “OMG” in a hilariously toneless, robotic voice.

Gun Trails is not for the faint of heart. This high-speed shmup goes from zero to 100 before you have a chance to register what’s happening. In it, you pilot a futuristic fighter jet and have to take on a never-ending swarm of enemies, gunning them down as they try to gun you down. The bullet patterns don’t leave much room on the small Playdate screen for dodging, so you have to be sharp. It really has an arcade feel to it, from the music to the way it screams “Gun Trails!” at you when it boots up, to the seemingly impossible high scores on the leaderboard.

This short interactive comic feels like it makes perfect use of everything the Playdate has to offer. It follows the journey of a botanist who is exploring alien worlds in search of edible plants, but runs into a bit of trouble. It is mostly told through illustrations, and you use the crank to move through each panel. But there are moments where you’ll have to get a bit more involved in the story — in one section, for example, you’ll need to tilt the console to guide the botanist’s movement through a zero-gravity room.

The Botanist only takes about 15 minutes to get through, but it’s a well-crafted story with some really gorgeous art that I think even people who aren’t into visual novel-type experiences can appreciate. And, there’s a sequel for when you finish and are hungry for more.

Bloom has gotten a lot of praise from Playdate owners, and it’s easy to understand why. The art is beautiful, the story feels personal and the soundtrack is the perfect thing to lull you into a chilled-out state. But Bloom is also a weird one, in that it doesn’t feel quite like a game with its narrative-heavy presentation, but also doesn’t exactly feel like a visual novel.

Bloom mostly plays out through text messages, and corresponds to real time. You play from the perspective of Midori, who has decided not to attend college (unbeknownst to her parents) and instead opens a flower shop. As she chats with her family, her girlfriend, friends and other characters, you read along and choose her responses. There’s also a simple gardening element — in which you buy and plant seeds, water them and harvest them to make some money — and an arcade-style mini game.

Bloom is the kind of thing you check in on a few times a day until you’ve reached the end, which could take several weeks. There’s not that much to it in the sense of gameplay, but there is something very satisfying about the way it uses the crank to switch floors, moving from Midori’s apartment room to the roof where her garden is. It probably won’t be for everyone, but it’s worth trying if you like social sims.

Echoes of the Emergent is made by the same team who created Bloom, but unlike the previous title, it’s wholly a visual novel. And it’s much, much darker. Echoes of the Emergent is the story of one girl’s struggle to survive and find answers about what happened to her family in a post-apocalyptic world. After a cataclysmic event wiped out everyone and everything around her, Ayumi has been living on her own in a building that’s somehow still standing, scavenging for food to get by.

It’s a heartbreaking story that shifts between Ayumi’s present time and flashbacks to her past. Echoes of the Emergent takes a few hours to complete and is illustrated with eerie, subtly moving visuals that will really suck you in. It left me hoping we see many more visual novels for the Playdate in the near future.