CODA

CODA is a Pulp-made, sci-fi adventure game, and it really nails the vibe it’s going for. It can be hard to nail any vibe at all in a Pulp game, but the best ones like The Keyper, Life’s Too Short, Pulpergeist, HANA, Eyeland, Initial Daydream, and many others manage it. HANA is probably the closest to the feel of CODA, and not just because it’s a four-letter, all-caps title. It’s also a game about being dropped into a world where you’re not quite sure what’s going on, and there’s only one way forward. The soundtrack is suitably crunchy, and the creatures you meet are always ominous.

CODA is, at its heart, a puzzle game. You move from one messed up place to another, solving black-and-white Sokoban-style puzzles, or looking around the environment for clues, or using the crank and your wits to clear a path forward. There are some points where you need to move really fast to beat a short timer and it could get a bit frustrating, but the punishment for failure is just restarting the current screen, so it’s no big ask to just try again. The puzzles make you feel smart when you figure them out, but aren’t so difficult that you’ll need to go looking for a walkthrough. It’s hard to pull that off! The whole game is less than an hour long and has no save points – it’s a great excuse to get completely absorbed in an alien world for a bit.

The Pulp engine has quite a few limitations, but this one is up there with the Terratopias of the world when it comes to art design. The look of the game kind of reminds me of… Carrion? The Metroidvania where you play the giant tentacle monster, that one. The world has a sort of tactility that you can really feel through the screen. Rough things look suitably rough, and goopy things look extra goopy. The story is drip-fed slowly and methodically, and it leaves you with as many questions as it answers. One of my favorite games of the last console generation was Lifeless Planet, and this is a smaller, creepier version of that!

CODA isn’t a scary game, necessarily, but it is unsettling. If you’re looking for some spooky, alien, science fiction on Playdate, this could be exactly what you need! And it’s on sale for the first month on Itch before the Catalog release. Ignore that backlog for another hour and explore a new world.

(Released April 1, 2025, on Itch. Coming to Catalog on April 22, 2025.)