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!

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.