I mentioned this back in my Mars After Midnight review, but this has been the year that I finally spent serious time with my Playdate. I preordered it the day preorders became available, received it about a year later and then… goofed off with it for an hour or two and put it down. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with it, but there just was nothing there that really held my interest. But things changed this year.

For the uninitiated, the Playdate is a pocket sized indie handheld console. It’s a little yellow square with a D-pad, two buttons, a monochrome screen, and a unique crank on its right side. It fits very comfortably in a pocket and feels good to hold. The screen is unfortunately not backlit, which makes it difficult to play in certain situations, but it’s become the gaming device that I just kind of bring with me everywhere.

From the start, the Playdate slowly gives you games in what it calls “season one”. These games are included with the purchase of the system, but you only get access to them in a scheduled period of time. I’m pretty sure this is why the system has its name, because some days you’ll wake up, see that you’ve gotten something new, and have a sort of “play date”. However, once you get through the season, those new games just sort of stop.

Adding more games to the Playdate has always been an option. You could download games from itch.io or similar sites, connect your Playdate to your PC with a USB cable, and then just dragging the games to the console like it was a flash drive. But to be honest, I’ve never bothered with that. I don’t know if it was the way I didn’t stick with the season one games or what, but I just didn’t feel the need to go through finding and downloading more games.

That changed with the release of Catalog, the Playdate’s on console store. And with it, came Mars After Midnight. I’ve already written a full review of that game, so I’m not going to go into here, but I had an absolute blast with it. Like, I would be shocked if it doesn’t make it on to my top ten games list this year. And along with it, I’ve found some other games I really like.

Just yesterday, I downloaded Root Bear off of Catalog. It’s a goofy little time waster where you use the crank to pour root beer for some bears. You turn the crank to open the tap, and then crank it backwards to close the tap, trying to get the root beer to fill up to a specific line on the glass. The closest you get to the line, the happier the bears are and the more money they give you. Their reactions are very funny, especially when you cause the glass to spill, making the bears scream in terror.

Another favorite is called Castle Tintagel. This is very much a classic Castlevania-style game, but with an Arthurian legend theme. Just like Castlevania, you move from left to right, dealing with annoying enemies and difficult jumps. You get subweapons from hitting torches and throw them by holding up while you hit the attack button. I found the game overly difficult to be honest, but it had numerous options to make the game less frustrating. After turning those on, I had a really great time. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s some clever uses of the crank, like using it in a boss battle to make an ally aim a bow and arrow.

I think the thing I like most about the Playdate is how much it reminds me of early mobile gaming. Before free to play gacha games became the norm, you used to spend just a couple bucks on an iPhone game. Sometimes it would be a goofy little time waster, sometimes it was something with more meat on its bones. This is almost exactly how my experience with Playdate’s Catalog has been.

It took a while for me to get there, but I genuinely love the Playdate. You’re not going to find too many absolute masterpieces on it, but what you will find is fun and creative gems that are nice to have on the go. Mine comes with me almost everywhere, I can’t recommend it enough.