Playdate Season 2 review: The Whiteout and Wheelsprung
Panic is not messing around with Playdate's second season. After starting off Season Two on the right foot with Dig! Dig! Dino! , Fulcrum Defender and the surprise rollout of Blippo+ , the team has followed through with another strong pair of games for week two. The Whiteout and Wheelsprung are, like the week one games, polar opposites of each other: a somber, narrative-heavy post-apocalyptic adventure and a nutty dirtbike game with realistic(ish) physics.
If you're looking for any throughline between them, I've got you. It's squirrels. You'll see. (Alright I may be reaching, but as both a journalist and a wildlife rehabilitator who is currently raising orphaned squirrels, just let me have this one).
This week also brought an update for the "intergalactic TV service," Blippo+ , and it looks like we'll be getting new content for some time to come. The Season Two team wrote in an email accompanying the latest drop that " Blippo+ itself is going to update every week for eleven (!) weeks, every Thursday at 10AM PT [1PM ET]." Once it's all over, there will be reruns. We'll get a countdown for that on week 12, the team says. Now, let's get into the new games.
Minutes into playing Scenic Route Software's The Whiteout, I became certain that this was going to be another game that would make me cry. The narrative tone is heavy, the atmosphere is bleak and absolutely nothing about it suggests that anything is going to get better… ever. It feels hopeless from the start, but you have to keep trudging along anyway. (If you've ever read The Road , the feeling should be familiar). When I finally reached the end, though, I wasn't in tears — I was totally speechless, in a "mouth hanging open, empty inside" kind of way. It's stunning.
The Whiteout is narrative driven, picking up in a barren post-apocalyptic version of the US in which a snowstorm began one spring and never stopped. The events are set in current times — the onset of the snow occurred in spring 2025 — giving it an eerie, close to home kind of quality. Everything about it feels like something that could happen. As you play through its five chapters, the story is told through the playable character's musings about the past and present. It's all beautifully written, with numerous sentimental moments that felt genuinely heartbreaking.
It did manage to get a few smiles out of me though; the character makes cynical quips here and there, and a nefarious bunch called The Woodpeckers comes to be known simply as "the 'peckers," which got me every time. And the appearance of a squirrel just kind of hanging out in the background served as a refreshing sign of life amid the desolation. (I wondered while playing if the squirrel was a checkpoint, but I'd have to go through it all again to figure that out for sure.)
The gameplay entails mostly linear exploration, searching for resources, solving puzzles and making choices about your next moves. There's not much in the way of action, and you spend most of the game just walking with a slowness that is at times maddening. But, while I definitely would have appreciated the option to speed up even a little (a gentle jog, maybe?), the lethargy helps to illustrate how hard it would be to carry on in such conditions. Backtracking several times to get all the resources you need to progress in some areas is painfully tedious, so the relief when you do complete the action is real. Patience is key in this game.
I fear some people will give up on this title early because of the pace, and I implore you not to do that. It's worth every minute. It's also worth it to play with headphones, as recommended, to really let yourself be immersed in the setting. I stayed up half the night playing and got up early the next morning to finish it, and I'm still thinking about the ending I came to. There are multiple endings according to the creators, so I'll likely dive back in for another go once I've had more time to digest. The Whiteout is without a doubt the most memorable game of both Playdate seasons to date. Nino van Hooff & Julie Bjørnskov
So, you played The Whiteout and now you're depressed. The Playdate team seems to have prepared for this, because the other game that dropped this week with the second release of Season Two may as well be the antidote. Wheelsprung is cute, charming and silly as hell. It's also a pretty challenging (and frustrating) physics game, but I do love a game that pisses me off a little.
The art of Wheelsprung is instantly recognizable as that of Julie Bjørnskov, one of the creators of Escape the Boardgame and Escape the Arcade , which is to say it's oozing whimsy. Bjørnskov made this one with programmer Nino van Hooff. The story is pretty simple: a family with a child who loves nuts — like, enough to scatter them all over the place in joy — has briefly left their home unattended, and you're a squirrel equipped with an absurdly flexible dirtbike who is on a mission to collect as many nuts as possible in their absence. There are nearly three dozen levels to complete, each of them an obstacle course you must figure out how to navigate on the two-wheeler. There's also a level editor to create your own tracks.
The squirrel's dirtbike is basically a Dr. Seuss contraption, and it's capable of some pretty impressive maneuvers. Lean in either direction using the D-pad and it can do a wheelie. Hit the down arrow and it'll instantly turn you to face the other way. But you must always be conscious of your balance. Allowing the squirrel's helmet to so much as tap an obstacle will result in a run-ending wipeout, as of course will all-out crashing. This game forces you to get extremely creative to traverse complicated tracks. There's a leaderboard and ideally you want to finish with the fastest time possible, but for a handful of levels my main goal at first was just figuring out how to make it to the end at all.
I don't want to give away too many hints about how to excel in this game, but I sure have spent a surprising amount of time driving my bike upside down dangling from one wheel, or rocking the bike back and forth to creep forward like an inchworm. It is absolutely ridiculous, and lots of (somewhat rage-inducing) fun.
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Mom Is Accused of Never Putting ‘Limits' on Her Daughter's 'Fun' in a Fight With Her Husband Over a Playdate
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Playdate Season 2 review: Long Puppy and Otto's Galactic Groove!!
We're officially halfway through Playdate Season Two, and so far there have been no flops. Last week brought us a balanced serving of doom, gloom and delight , but this week is all about keeping things light and silly. That's not to say the latest two games are a walk in the park, though. The third drop of Season Two features Long Puppy and Otto's Galactic Groove!! , and as playful as they are, you're still in for a challenge. But when you need a break, there's always more Blippo+ . I'm convinced that Playdate developers are a different breed. This console has led me to some of the oddest games I've played in a while, and Long Puppy is yet another ridiculous but charming entry to the canon. It is essentially a game of fetch. You play as a dachshund on an outing with your owner, and all you have to do is retrieve the ball they've thrown. Simple enough, right? Normal, even? Of course not. Each level is a complex obstacle course — platforms, underground chambers, rooms with doors that can only be opened from one side, etc. And you're working against the clock. After a certain amount of time passes, you'll no longer be chasing the ball alone. A ghost dog with razer-sharp chompers will show up to steal the ball from you and try to bite your head off. But none of that's the weird stuff. The weird stuff is in how you move and how you're scored. The dachshund you play as isn't any regular dachshund. Its head can rotate a full 360 degrees, and whichever way you point it (using the crank) determines which direction you'll travel in. It doesn't just walk, either, but rather stretches forward and contracts like some sort of extreme Slinky-worm. There's food scattered throughout each level, and eating will make the dog's body grow longer and longer so it can cross greater gaps. The result is what looks like an alien wearing a dachshund suit and trying really hard to behave inconspicuously but failing. As you explore and collect food, you may also find some interesting pee to sniff. Yep, pee, and there's a pee journal that serves as a record of all the different types of urine you've encountered. Clown pee? Check! Loafing Cat pee? Check! It's all incredibly silly. At the end of each level, once you've successfully brought the ball back to your owner, you'll have to make the dog take a massive poop using the crank, and the height of this dump (in feet) will tell you whether you finished with 100 percent completeness or not. Absurdity aside, the mechanics of this game are really interesting and make for a unique playing experience. It all seems at first like it's going to be a chill puzzle platformer of sorts, and then the ghost dog shows up to unleash chaos on everything. It's pretty fun. I am, as they say, a big fan of whatever the hell this is. Otto's Galactic Groove!! has been both a great and terrible thing for me. It's great in that it is a really cool take on the rhythm game formula, with a cute story and some fun tunes to jam out to. It's terrible in that it triggers my perfectionism in the exact way games like Guitar Hero used to, trapping me in a loop of replaying each song until I've hit every note to achieve a perfect final score. There's a lot of screaming involved. I may not be a strict completionist in some games, but rhythm games just do something to me, and I cannot rest until I see that 100 percent at the end of it all. In Otto's Galactic Groove!! , a space version of those adorable " sea bunny " sea slugs named Otto has been sent on a mission to explore the galaxy and find inspiration for the alien music producer Tomie. Otto stops at several different planets to chat with eccentric characters and hear their songs, and you play along with them. Now, there are three difficulty settings for this game, but if I'm being honest, none of them are particularly easy. Casual is the lowest and it's said to be a "gentle introduction," but it didn't feel so gentle in my first two or three attempts to keep up with even the tutorial song. I cannot even fathom what playing on Extreme would be like. This rhythm game doesn't just entail hitting a button at the exact right time as the note crosses a designated threshold — the threshold here is a moving, oval-shaped slider that you control using the crank. So you need to get the oval into the right place and hit the note at the precise time when it makes contact. Finding the sweet spot was tricky, too. I first assumed the notes would need to be in the dead center of the oval, but the target is actually somewhere right before that. A patch that's since been released seems to fix this, though, making the timing more intuitive. The songs made for this game are fun and span different genres, so you won't feel like you're just listening to the same thing over and over again (unless you are, in fact, playing the same songs over and over again, like me in my futile quest for perfection). Early on, you'll encounter a fish with a case of the blues (his "girl-fish" broke up with him), and I quite liked his heartbreak anthems. Under the Jukebox tab in the menu, you can also find songs from other Playdate games like Resonant Tale and Bloom , which is a really nice touch. This is another Playdate game in which the central story is told through a comic that you scroll using the crank, and I remain a fan of that approach. While it might not look like it from an outsider's perspective (my partner checked in on me multiple times RE: all the screaming to make sure everything was okay, especially after the game crashed and I lost all of my initial progress) I'm enjoying Otto's Galactic Groove!! a lot… just in a way that feels kind of masochistic.
