Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure
This was the first third-party Playdate game - everything else up to this point was made by Panic themselves. Which, fair – they didn’t even have a prototype made yet. So why not have Keita Takahashi, the guy that made Katamari Damacy, make a game for your unannounced new game system?
How did he get involved? In the early 2010’s, Panic CEO Cabel Sasser reached out to Namco directly and wanted to make t-shirts for Katamari Damacy just because he loved the game so much. Keita never really thought/cared about merchandizing his creation despite the obvious aesthetic of the whole thing, and (despite the fact that Panic was just some Mac app company and NOT a t-shirt company) Namco was like… knock yourself out, kid. So they did. And got an eventual Playdate game out of it years later, because Keita eventually met the people making t-shirts for his game and they became… if not friends, at least acquaintances. (According to Keita himself, he doesn’t have any friends. Not in a sad way, just in a matter-of-fact way. Which is too bad, because he seems weird and fun.)
Anyway, what is this game about? It’s a semi-autobiographical tale of how Keita met his wife. You control Crankin, a man(?) made of geometric shapes, who is late for a 3:00 date with Crankette. Not for a good reason. He was just at home, sitting down. When he realizes he needs to be a little more proactive so he doesn’t die alone, he rushes out of the house, already late for his very important date. You help him get to his date by controlling time, because why wouldn’t you. Crank forward to move time forward or backwards to move time back, and at the same speed you crank, as well. Kind of like an old movie camera, which was Keita’s inspiration for the whole thing. All he had at the beginning of development was a description of the Playdate, and his mind went, “old movie camera!”
Enemies move at normal speed but you and the music are controlled by the crank. That’s all the control you have: forward or backward and the speed. Start crankin’ slowly and he will walk, or crank faster and he will run, in whichever direction you choose. Find a chair and he’ll sit for a second and have some tea before moving on. Find a hurdle and he’ll jump it. Find a flower and he’ll bend down to smell it. Find a pull-up bar and he’ll swing from it. These minor adjustments to his height and distance from the ground allow Crankin to avoid the various Katamari-esque enemies blocking your way: birds, pigs, little sentient poops, things like that. Hit one? Wake up back in your house immediately, ready to try again.
If you successfully avoid all the enemies and make it to Crankette at the end of the stage, guess what? She’s still mad, because no matter how fast you were, you started the level already late for your date. A quick kick to the groin, or a slap, or a full suplex, and then you’re onto the next level, where more complex enemy patterns await.
Seems simple, but it gets so very difficult, and there’s 50 levels, each harder than the last. And you need to beat each level quick enough to earn a heart on the level select screen, but that time limit isn’t spelled out, so you have to just try over and over again if you want the fabled 100% completion. The amount of cranking precision you’ll need to just narrowly drink tea under a darting bird, or leap over a table and a pig with the same leap in the same split-second, is near-superhuman. But the levels are short enough and yet just long enough that when you finally beat one that you’d been stuck on for days, the satisfaction is great.
The music and sound effects are all in sync with the cranking, too, so you can use both visual and audio cues to help you learn where and when to approach jumps and ducks. Like some other Playdate games, the audio here is almost all done by someone making mouth noises then editing the sounds, even the footsteps. The key here was making sounds that were recognizable when played in either direction, because you’ll hear them backwards when rolling back time. The zips, plonks, and whirrs would all fit in with any of Keita’s other games.
This is the game that shows what the Playdate is for and can do. It featured heavily in all their early marketing, and the fact that they make you wait to play it until week 2 of season 1 is both crazy and makes perfect sense. You’re not ready for it to be your first Playdate game. But when you have a console of your own, this will be the first game you show to your friends.
(Included for free as part of Season One.)