We're officially halfway through Playdate Season Two, and so far there have been no flops. Last week brought us a balanced serving of doom, gloom and delight, but this week is all about keeping things light and silly. That's not to say the latest two games are a walk in the park, though. The third drop of Season Two features Long Puppy and Otto's Galactic Groove!!, and as playful as they are, you're still in for a challenge. But when you need a break, there's always more Blippo+.
Long Puppy
I'm convinced that Playdate developers are a different breed. This console has led me to some of the oddest games I've played in a while, and Long Puppy is yet another ridiculous but charming entry to the canon. It is essentially a game of fetch. You play as a dachshund on an outing with your owner, and all you have to do is retrieve the ball they've thrown. Simple enough, right? Normal, even? Of course not.
Each level is a complex obstacle course — platforms, underground chambers, rooms with doors that can only be opened from one side, etc. And you're working against the clock. After a certain amount of time passes, you'll no longer be chasing the ball alone. A ghost dog with razer-sharp chompers will show up to steal the ball from you and try to bite your head off. But none of that's the weird stuff. The weird stuff is in how you move and how you're scored.
The dachshund you play as isn't any regular dachshund. Its head can rotate a full 360 degrees, and whichever way you point it (using the crank) determines which direction you'll travel in. It doesn't just walk, either, but rather stretches forward and contracts like some sort of extreme Slinky-worm. There's food scattered throughout each level, and eating will make the dog's body grow longer and longer so it can cross greater gaps. The result is what looks like an alien wearing a dachshund suit and trying really hard to behave inconspicuously but failing. As you explore and collect food, you may also find some interesting pee to sniff. Yep, pee, and there's a pee journal that serves as a record of all the different types of urine you've encountered. Clown pee? Check! Loafing Cat pee? Check!
It's all incredibly silly. At the end of each level, once you've successfully brought the ball back to your owner, you'll have to make the dog take a massive poop using the crank, and the height of this dump (in feet) will tell you whether you finished with 100 percent completeness or not. Absurdity aside, the mechanics of this game are really interesting and make for a unique playing experience. It all seems at first like it's going to be a chill puzzle platformer of sorts, and then the ghost dog shows up to unleash chaos on everything. It's pretty fun. I am, as they say, a big fan of whatever the hell this is.
Otto's Galactic Groove!!
Otto's Galactic Groove!! has been both a great and terrible thing for me. It's great in that it is a really cool take on the rhythm game formula, with a cute story and some fun tunes to jam out to. It's terrible in that it triggers my perfectionism in the exact way games like Guitar Hero used to, trapping me in a loop of replaying each song until I've hit every note to achieve a perfect final score. There's a lot of screaming involved. I may not be a strict completionist in some games, but rhythm games just do something to me, and I cannot rest until I see that 100 percent at the end of it all.
In Otto's Galactic Groove!!, a space version of those adorable "sea bunny" sea slugs named Otto has been sent on a mission to explore the galaxy and find inspiration for the alien music producer Tomie. Otto stops at several different planets to chat with eccentric characters and hear their songs, and you play along with them.
Now, there are three difficulty settings for this game, but if I'm being honest, none of them are particularly easy. Casual is the lowest and it's said to be a "gentle introduction," but it didn't feel so gentle in my first two or three attempts to keep up with even the tutorial song. I cannot even fathom what playing on Extreme would be like. This rhythm game doesn't just entail hitting a button at the exact right time as the note crosses a designated threshold — the threshold here is a moving, oval-shaped slider that you control using the crank. So you need to get the oval into the right place and hit the note at the precise time when it makes contact. Finding the sweet spot was tricky, too. I first assumed the notes would need to be in the dead center of the oval, but the target is actually somewhere right before that. A patch that's since been released seems to fix this, though, making the timing more intuitive.
The songs made for this game are fun and span different genres, so you won't feel like you're just listening to the same thing over and over again (unless you are, in fact, playing the same songs over and over again, like me in my futile quest for perfection). Early on, you'll encounter a fish with a case of the blues (his "girl-fish" broke up with him), and I quite liked his heartbreak anthems. Under the Jukebox tab in the menu, you can also find songs from other Playdate games like Resonant Tale and Bloom, which is a really nice touch.
This is another Playdate game in which the central story is told through a comic that you scroll using the crank, and I remain a fan of that approach. While it might not look like it from an outsider's perspective (my partner checked in on me multiple times RE: all the screaming to make sure everything was okay, especially after the game crashed and I lost all of my initial progress) I'm enjoying Otto's Galactic Groove!! a lot… just in a way that feels kind of masochistic.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playdate-season-2-review-long-puppy-and-ottos-galactic-groove-130025012.html?src=rss
