A Balanced Brew is a challenging but charming tale of one person's unicycle-mounted quest for a good coffee, across improbably treacherous terrain.
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I finished my first crank based game on my first crank based video game platform!
A fun level-based puzzler with tons of additional replay value.
The core mechanic is relatively easy to grasp but fairly difficult to master. Some elements (especially hitboxes) feel a tiny bit unrefined, but never overly frustrating.
I may have been projecting this but it certainly felt like there was physics simulation to some degree which adds a lot of skill ceiling, it felt really great to master the relationship between speed and balance in the later levels.
You can return to each puzzle and master it for a higher score, I'm fairly confident this is done by being faster and smoother, though I wasn't entirely sure how the scoring was done if I'm being honest.
All that said... this was far and away the most fun I've had on the playdate so far. It's the first serious game that felt really worth completing, every time I booted up the device it's pretty much the first thing I'd want to play.
It also really feels like the prefect game for the playdate. I can't imagine the mechanic working even slightly without the crank. Using the crank feels incredibly natural in this instance.
I wasn't feeling all that into gaming throughout 2023. finally getting my playdate brought back so much joy to gaming for me. This was easily my highlight for the year.
The core mechanic is relatively easy to grasp but fairly difficult to master. Some elements (especially hitboxes) feel a tiny bit unrefined, but never overly frustrating.
I may have been projecting this but it certainly felt like there was physics simulation to some degree which adds a lot of skill ceiling, it felt really great to master the relationship between speed and balance in the later levels.
You can return to each puzzle and master it for a higher score, I'm fairly confident this is done by being faster and smoother, though I wasn't entirely sure how the scoring was done if I'm being honest.
All that said... this was far and away the most fun I've had on the playdate so far. It's the first serious game that felt really worth completing, every time I booted up the device it's pretty much the first thing I'd want to play.
It also really feels like the prefect game for the playdate. I can't imagine the mechanic working even slightly without the crank. Using the crank feels incredibly natural in this instance.
I wasn't feeling all that into gaming throughout 2023. finally getting my playdate brought back so much joy to gaming for me. This was easily my highlight for the year.