Zipper is a smart game, with a satisfying gameplay loop - the mechanics are deceptively simple but surprisingly deep. Almost every time I rushed a room, I paid for it even when I thought I had a good grasp on the game. The sound design is fantastic here, with great atmospheric music and awesome sound effects. The artwork looks excellent too.

It's a little bit mazelike for my tastes, hunting for a random key can be a bit tiresome especially as you lose all progress from a single mistake.. but I can see the appeal also.

Foddy has long held that he feels "it’s a worthwhile exercise for any game designer to make a chess variant, a dice variant and a Pong variant."

I'd almost call 'Zipper' his soulslike.
Maybe an overstatement, but it is certainly in that realm of risk and repeat, callous brutality, etc... (I know it's a stretch but it felt right so idk)

Zipper is a retro computer era inspired action puzzler that has the player control a samurai on his quest to assassinate a nobleman of sorts.

You move in one of four directions at a time for as many spaces as can be achieved in a straight line. Enemies get as many 'moves' as you do for the most part. You can use the crank to visualize what will happen ahead of committing to a move, every mistake is your fault since you can literally SEE what's about to happen.

After some trial and error you'll easily master this game and see it through.

Zipper is not truly on the scale of 'getting over it' but it's certainly another masterclass in simple game design.

This game kept me coming back until I felt I had it beat, and then i still came back to see if I could do it any better.

Clickbait title: Has Bennett Foddy Done It Again??? (yes)

I played this game knowing absolutely nothing about it beforehand. I saw that Bennett Foddy had made a game for the Playdate and decided I wouldn't read anything about it before playing it myself. Happily, having played it I can now say it's easily the most compelling game of Playdate's Season One (at least so far).

There's a special place in my heart for games where you die in one hit, games where you're challenged to explore a large but mostly static environment over the course of many attempts, and games where progression doesn't come through upgrading your character but through deeper understanding of the game's systems. This pushes all of those buttons super hard so it was no surprise when I immediately fell in love with it.

No, there are no checkpoints. There are no upgrades either, and enemy placements are lightly randomized between play sessions. There's also no tutorial. If you're willing to fumble around and learn from your mistakes, the game will teach you how to play it. Checkpoints and upgrades aren't at all necessary for a game this sharply designed. Zipper is beautiful to look at, wonderful to touch, and it has a razor sharp edge for a game this compact. I highly recommend it for any fans of Bennett Foddy's work.

I think this game looks great on the system, with the 1 bit art-style really lending itself the Samurai aesthetic the game is going for, but I ended up a little bored by the game. The concept is sound - Zipper is a semi-rogue lite in that enemy placement stays the same when restarting a run you've died on, but changes it if you quit out and restart.

In practice, it wasn't so interesting. That was mainly the lack of any real push to get what I needed to go where I needed to get to. There are no upgrades, the map is always the same layout and though positions in a 'room' will change, the makeup of enemies doesn't. It could have been a decent high score/time attack game but the random placement of a mandatory key each round makes that aspect far more luck based and thus tedious for repeat playthroughs.

Crank-watch: On the surface the crank seems to have no functionality in this game but it actually serves as a preview for on screen enemy movement when you have highlighted a target square for yourself - it's a bit of a shame that the game doesn't mention this, leaving an almost vital mechanic completely missable.

Zipper is a great little game on the Playdate, perfectly short with a quick gameplay cycle. Fun for folks that appreciate tactical one vs many combat - in a way it turns into more of a puzzle game than anything.

Environments were fun to explore, and once you get a lay of the land, replays turn into optimizing your runs for the best possible score.

Game design does a good job at keeping you on your toes and throwing new mechanics at you that are fairly self-explanatory (plus there's usually a little dialogue to support enemy fighting styles for tutorialization).

Art style and SFX are all great too, looks great on the monochromatic Playdate screen.

The grid based movement and execution of zips is really satisfying, and the look captures a very particular feeling that shines in its limited capacity. Do yourself a favor and look up the crank function and the map.

I did not complete the game as I weighed continuing on vs retrying it in the cheesy way I had been and decided instead to move on to other games.

The cheesy strategy was to memorize the patterns and go to the same chest each time vs hunt and explore. This was my early experience in the game but I quickly saw how it would get repetitive. I felt this to be a bit against the spirit of the game so I lost the commitment to finishing it. I do appreciate the tight and varied design for the prowess it shows, if it doesn’t really happen to mind the player’s time. And it does happen to be very funny that such a hardcore game exists on what looks and feels like the silliest current gaming device. A bit too far to stick through as someone who likes fairly difficult games

la obra de Bennet Foddy para Playdate llama la atención por lo conservadora y, en términos de género, poco radical que se siente. Con un estilo que recuerda a títulos de la Spectrum, y un modelo de juego que se asienta en títulos de estrategia difíciles de los años ochenta y noventa (pensad en los primeros X-Com, por ejemplo), da la impresión de que esta vez Foddy se ha limitado a copiar el formato de un género que el público general ha olvidado.

Eso no quiere decir que el juego sea demasiado difícil o impenetrable a ojos de jugadores noveles. Su principal aliciente es la frustración a la hora de tener que perder progreso y empezar desde el principio cada vez que caes a manos de tus enemigos. Su otro factor es la relativa libertad que ofrece para dejarte escoger nuevas rutas en cada momento. Al cabo de unas pocas sesiones, el juego ya no se presenta como una quimera incomprensible, pero pasa rápidamente a convertirse en una rutina algo monótona. Hasta qué punto es capaz de justificar ese tiempo es el tipo de preguntas que los juegos de Foddy han querido siempre obligarte a pensar. Si tuviera que compararlo con otras entradas suyas, diría que es uno de los más accesibles que ha hecho hasta hoy. Pero si tuviera que compararlo con otros títulos de Playdate, diría que es, junto a Time Travel Adventures, el juego que quiere incitarte de forma más agresiva a seguir jugando hasta que llegues al ansiado palacio final. Con que no creo que sea de lo mejor que te encontrarás aquí.

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Bennet Foddy's Playdate title strikes me for how conservative it feels, in terms of genre and mechanical ingenuity. With a style that's reminiscent of adventures games for the Spectrum, and a gameplay that takes cues from difficult strategy games of the 80s and 90s (think early X-Com), it seems like the author has merely decided to copy the format of a genre that's been already forgotten and leave it at that.

That's not to say that the game is too difficult or impenetrable. Its main incentive is how frustrating it gets any time you lose progress and start from the beginning. Its other incentive is the freedom it offers by letting you choose your route each time you die. After a few sessions, the game no longer feels mysterious, and quickly turns into something of a grind. To what extent it's able to justify its lenght is the kind of question that Foddy wants players to ask themselves. If I had to compare it to the other entries of his, I'd say it's one of the easier ones. But comparing it to other Playdate titles, I'd say it is, along with Time Travel Adventures, one of the titles that most aggressively pushes you to keep playing until extenuation.

So, to sum it up, I don't think it's a very interesting title, though it definitely begins nicely enough.