Get a good look at Gloom Gate, Houm and Soggy Froggy from Playdate S3.
Stretch out your cranking fingers, charge your reading lamp and prepare for Playdate Season 3, which goes live on October 8. The latest season will run for four weeks, dropping two games per week, for a total of eight games. Playdate Season 3 costs $39 and pre-orders are live now.
Each Playdate season includes a collection of games made specifically for the handheld, curated by Panic and released weekly in a blind-box kind of fashion. Panic offered a peek at the Season 3 titles during its Playdate Update Showcase on Wednesday, revealing all eight games: Soggy Froggy by Root Bear crew team root, Gloom Gate by satOlite creator LuBu, Houm by fissh studio BuuuuBunnyGames, Sound Mind by Sasquatchers dev Chuck Jordan, HELLEVATOR by ICY DUNGEON‘s DRD, Bonkhope by Long Puppy maker indiana-jonas, Chance’s Lucky Escape 2 by Goloso Games and Julia Minamata, and Cross Words by Ratcheteer developer Shaun Inman.
The showcase offered a closer look at Soggy Froggy, Gloom Gate and Houm, three very different experiences. Soggy Froggy is a cartoonish, crank-heavy title about stirring a pot to keep its liquid at the proper temperature for a bathing amphibian; Gloom Gate is an old-school dungeon-crawling RPG with soulslike elements and luscious animations; and Houm is an unsettling point-and-click adventure set in a mysterious mansion littered with valuables and existential trauma.
Playdate Season 1 is built into every device and it includes 24 games, while Season 2 costs $39 and features 12 games, plus the delightfully campy Blippo+ cable TV simulator.
Season 3, you’ll note, has fewer titles than Season 2 but costs the same amount. We don’t say it often, but this is inflation that we can get behind: Playdate games are super affordable overall (priced around $10 on the high end), they’re uniquely innovative by nature, and they’re only getting more detailed. Developers are constantly testing the limits of the Playdate and discovering new use cases for the black-and-white cranking machine, as showcased by its breadth of supported genres, and this recent and very rad 3D demo by Cristina Ramos. Besides, $5 per game is a great deal no matter how you slice it. Or crank it.
And on top of that, the Playdate Catalog Fall Sale will run from November 5-19, offering discounts on more than 200 games.
