The second batch of free Playdate games came quicker than I was expecting, and among them was one of the best regarded titles Crankin's Time Travel Adventure. It's a clever and well made game where you use the crank to move a robot forward and backwards along his path, avoiding obstacles so that he gets to his date as quickly as possible (but never on time). As part of his movement, the robot will automatically perform actions like bending over to smell flowers and climbing over tables, which you can utilize to avoid moving enemies. If any of them overlap even a pixel, the level restarts. It's a very cute game and utilizes the crank the best of any games I've played so far, but the game has a fatal flaw in that it's incredibly difficult. The crank controls are pretty precise, but I found figuring out how to pose the robot to avoid the enemies to be surprisingly precise. It's a game that I admire in its technique and ambition, but I actually hated playing. I'll admit that I only finished the first 20 levels, which I found frustrating by themselves, only to learn that there's 30 more even harder levels. This one definitely boils down to personal taste, but I personally found it more frustrating than rewarding.

Lo que a Boogie Loops le faltaba en palanca, este juego lo exprime hasta la extenuación. Un juego que imita la cadencia de un corto de Buster Keaton y que te incita a sudar como seguramente haría el cómico mudo.

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What Boogie Loops lacked in originality, this game squeezes the Playdate's lever to the point of exhaustion. A game that mimics the cadence of a Buster Keaton short film and encourages you to play as the silent comedian.

Another controversial playdate season opinion, but I'm not having much fun with this one. I'm 19 stages in and found out there's a whopping 50 STAGES. I think I've done enough to have an opinion.

I appreciate the weird aesthetic and really fun animation, and the way the game makes a unique use for the crank is really charming. I just find the actual puzzles often really frustrating. It's a lot more trial and error than actual puzzle solving.

I'm gonna keep trying here and there, but I feel like I'll end up abandoning this before the end.

This is a challenging but fun and fair puzzle game that finds you manipulating time with the crank to get Crankin through all the obstacles standing between he and his date. There is trial and error required to make it through all fifty levels, but I otherwise didn't have much trouble completing the game. My advice if you're starting out, or you've already abandoned it, is to power through the few tricky levels. These few tough levels are sprinkled through and act as culminations of the mechanics to which you've been introduced. But immediately after one of those challenge levels, the difficulty drops way down so as to start training you on new mechanics. It does NOT continually get harder as you get deeper in the game. For example, day 47 was hard. Days 48, 49, and 50 were breezes. Stick with it!

Weird: Automaton

The only instance in Keita Takahashi's oeuvre of overt difficulty and challenge. Whereas stages in Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari occasionally presented the player with moments that tested their skill and know-how -- primarily in the former's Ursa Major and Taurus levels, the latter's Cowbear request -- Crankin Presents Time Travel Adventure offers little of the toy-like reprieve found in Takahashi's other titles. This has no doubt caught most Playdate owners off-guard, particularly those who, like me, picked up a Playdate almost exclusively for a new digital Takahashi playground. What we received instead is a (literally) mechanically intense movement-based, animation-frame-dependent dodge-em-up featuring memorisation and routing like one would expect from Gradius, with the pixel perfect precision of I Want To Be The Guy in a coat of Wattam paint.

Here more than with any other Playdate title, the specifics of the crank must be appreciated. Like an electromechanical re-imagining of a well-oiled wooden crank toy, the rotation is smooth and defined with just enough resistance to keep it steady when not being turned. This is critical in Crankin Presents as it means each position of the crank at a point in time correlates exactly with a state in Crankin's timeline. Rotating the crank, say, exactly 476.2 degrees, then cranking it the other way 476.2 degrees back puts me in the exact same frame of animation, the same location I was in. This results in two layers of memorisation being demanded of the player.

On a macro level, many date's layouts must be roughly mentally mapped out to understand where hazards are, and where they can be avoided. On the micro level, each attempt's variations in where your cranking starts and ends, and the need for positioning Crankin in a specific point in time, means remembering roughly where he will be situated in relation to the physical crank. On some dates, this amounts to ensuring the crank starts in the same spot on each attempt to try and enact some semblance of actualised muscle memory. The advice of some to simply crank as quickly as possible and listen to sound cues to know when to slow down, generally works as well but tighter sequences still require specificity of movement. Needing to move to specific frames/times would be tedious with conventional controls, but the crank makes it exceedingly natural and easy to do. The physical act of speeding up or slowing down your cranking is a tremendous joy that promotes a oneness with Crankin.

Aesthetically, Crankin Presents is starkly contrasted against most other Playdate titles. Rather than black on white, everything is presented in white on black which is gorgeous. The high level of detail (or at least smoothness) means nothing reads as pixellated, but that avoidance of chunky pixels means hitboxes are exacting and occasionally unforgiving. This is most pronounced with Poopy-kun. Being so much smaller than most other hazards (and situated near the constant ambulation of Crankin's legs), this tiny guy represents one of the greatest headaches despite being my favourite character. The particles emanating from him are themselves part of the hitbox, but as singular pixels they are often difficult to see or understand where they are in relation to Crankin. Poopy-kun's exacting demands are not often the sole reason for failure, but he is nonetheless testament to the potential issues of favouring fidelity over clarity on the Playdate.

If the difficulty were not enough of a departure, the sound design also makes Crankin Presents stand out from Takahashi's gameography. There is no music, and the only sounds are your footsteps accompanied by pitch-shifting "One, two" chants, and the indicators of obstacles. Curiously, I think this is entirely to its benefit as a title on a pick-up-and-play device. While I lose something by not having the sound on, I don't lose everything like I would with Wattam or Katamari. For those titles their sound is perhaps less important for their gameplay, but so much more vital to their identity. I love the squeakiness of Crankin Presents, but I'm not getting a fundamentally lesser experience if I play in its absence.

The greatest joy of Crankin Presents is its surprises. Those 'A-ha!' moments of discovering how a specific animation can be used for a multitude of obstacles, or the realisation that supposedly superficial graphical pleasantries serve gameplay functions as well. Those feelings of thinking the game surely must be done only for there to be so many more dates. Those ever-present subversions of level expectations. And in true Keita Takahashi fashion, coming away from a 100% par-time completion realising there was no extrinsic reward for doing so, only a profound sense of self-satisfaction in taking this meticulously designed mechanical toy and figuring out how every part of it ticks. The Mechanical Turk has been dismantled only for me to realise how human it was all along.