It’s hard to believe that Playdate Season Two is almost over already, but here we are in week five with just one more drop of new games left to go after this. In the latest batch, we got the climbing metroidvania, Tiny Turnip, and Chance’s Lucky Escape, a short point-and-click adventure that leans into the absurd. In line with the rest of this season’s games, which have consistently been really solid, they’re both pretty damn fun.
Tiny Turnip
Tiny Turnip is one of the standouts of this season for me. It sits at the sweet spot of weird, a bit challenging and extremely engaging, and I could not put it down once I started playing. And the soundtrack absolutely rules.
It’s a metroidvania about an ambitious root vegetable who is reaching for the stars. Literally. The turnip makes a wish, sprouts arms and sets out climbing toward the sky. The subsequent adventure takes place across an unexpectedly huge map and requires a lot of precise, calculated movements as you navigate gaps, moving obstacles and environmental hazards, uncover hidden rooms and collect keys to access locked areas. Ultimately, the goal is to get the crystal vegetables that are scattered around the map so the little turnip’s dreams can come true, but there are also stars to collect for the completionists among us.
Getting around in this game is fun. For a normal climb, you use the crank to move the turnip’s arms individually, pressing B to hold onto grabbable surfaces and switch hands. But as you progress, you pick up more abilities so the turnip can move in other ways too, like curling its arms in to roll, swimming, jumping, etc. These maneuvers generally involve launching the turnip in some way — out of water or slingshot-style between walls, for example — and it’s awesome.
I love the way this game uses the crank and it really is just a blast to play.
Chance’s Lucky Escape
There are a few things you need to know about Chance, “the luckiest dog in the world”: 1) he’s about as unlucky as he is lucky and 2) he’s not a bad guy, he just steals cars and robs banks sometimes! He’s also some sort of henchman for the dog mafia. In Chance’s Lucky Escape — a super short, point-and-click puzzle adventure game that plays out over six chapters — you have to help Chance get out of bind after bind as he tries in vain to get to his meeting with The Boss, Snowball, while also evading police.
The game is described as being “inspired by 80s cartoons and absurdist comedy films,” and it definitely captures those vibes. Every scenario Chance ends up in is completely ridiculous. Figuring out how to get Chance out of the messes he’s found himself in, like getting stuck in the sewers after falling into an open manhole or trying not to drown while tied to a chair underwater, requires a bit of thinking and creativity. But none of the puzzles are prohibitively hard, which keeps things feeling light and silly.
At the very beginning, you’re informed that you’ll need to employ the crank, microphone and even the accelerometer at some points, which was handy knowledge in moments where I felt briefly stuck after clicking on every clickable item and still getting nowhere. When in doubt, just start trying weird things and something’s likely to work (The Whiteout, from a few weeks ago, prepared me well for this).
As I said earlier, this one’s pretty short, but it’s just the right length to pick up on your lunch break. I could totally see this being a series and would happily dive back into Chance’s misadventures if ever new episodes in his saga were to be made.
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