The Playdate is a great indie puzzle machine
We live in a wonderful time for puzzle games. Apparently everyone, The New York Times on Linkedin, has fun puzzles to play, so every morning I have plenty of options to go with my first coffee of the day. Lately, however, much of my daily puzzle time comes from an unlikely source: the Playdate.
Panic’s little yellow handheld is best known for housing weird indie games you can’t find anywhere else, many of which use a hand crank to play. But it’s also built up a library of excellent puzzle games playable in quick bursts. It’s easy to put a Playdate in your pocket and retrieve it when you need to kill a few minutes; This is especially useful if you’re someone, like me, who actively tries to avoid reaching for your phone in these moments. Here are some of my recent favorites.
Like the Playdate itself, Lexgrid it looks like something from an alternate universe. It’s a bit like a crossword search with crosswords. In each level you must find a series of words in a grid of letters. The problem is that you receive a hint about the word you need to find, instead of the word itself. To complicate matters further, clues can mean different things; As you progress, you will discover different symbols, each of which has a special meaning. One might ask you to find the opposite of the clue word, another will ask you to look for a synonym. These are a bit like word modifiers.
The symbols get more complex and weird as you go, but the tricky part is that you don’t get any real instructions. Instead, you have to figure it all out for yourself. This is both the best and worst part of Lexgrid; It’s amazing to solve a particularly obscure puzzle, but I often found myself struggling. Fortunately, the game usually gives you several puzzles to solve at once, so you can bounce back whenever you get stuck.
Rocking Botmeanwhile, reminds me of an even more lo-fi version of the Nintendo game box boy series. You play as a little guy in a black and white world, and your job is entirely to flip certain switches to get to the next level, where you flip other switches. These levels are small and limited to a single screen, but are still (almost always) very satisfying to solve.
You have a very limited range of options; in reality, all you can do is press boxes and switches, and change colors as you enter strange portals. These are important because you can only step on squares when you are the opposite color. This simplicity in terms of movement and mobility means that the levels require a lot of spatial awareness to solve, and for me at least, quite a bit of experimentation. Luckily, there’s a rewind button that encourages you to try things without any repercussions.
I also like What time is it? Few games have such a perfectly descriptive title. It’s like a puzzle book where each page is a single picture, from which you have to determine the time of day. It could be a string of numbers, a bunch of playing cards, or maybe even a simple word. And from there, you have to determine what time it is. There is a hint system, but for the most part it’s just looking at an image and trying to work out what it’s telling you. Telling the time means turning the crank on the Playdate to set a watch, which is a fun twist, and the 50 included puzzles can be solved in any order you want. Which is good, because some of them are difficult. But again, it makes your eventual victory all the more rewarding.
