Flipper Lifter
Serenity Forge’s Flipper Lifter is a straight-up arcade action game controlled entirely with the crank. The playfield is a cross-section of one of five levels (Hotel, Mines, Mountain, Construction, or Space), and you control the one elevator that everyone gets to share. Your job? Deliver the penguins one-by-one to their desired floor, with additional floors being added all the time.
Here’s a quick rundown of the mechanics. Your elevator can hold four penguins at a time. There is increased weight when going upwards with more penguins compared to going down, so it takes more cranks to raise your elevator when there’s more penguins on it. Each penguin dropped off adds three seconds to your initial 60-second time limit, which itself can’t go above 60. The penguins will wait an unlimited amount of time to be picked up, but you need to drop them off ASAP, and the drop-off timer appears to be the same for each penguin. So first-in, first-out is the best strategy in general, but sometimes it’s just a lot better to pick one up or drop one off on the way to a far-off penguin delivery. They have a little exclamation point above the floor that they want to be dropped off on, and the icon slowly drains then starts to flash as the time runs down.
There are certain levels where the elevator also has to go left or right instead of just up and down, and that’s accomplished by stopping on non-drop-off floors that contain a pulley – wait there for a moment and it’ll whip your elevator to the side. (I had to look this up on Reddit to figure out how to move my elevator left or right. I just kept pushing buttons and didn’t realize there was a useful floor hidden between the normal floors.) Each level has its own scoreboard, and you need to get a certain number of cumulative points across all the levels (one point per penguin) to unlock the later levels. The absence of a global leaderboard hurts it, though; a high score chasing game like this where I’m competing only against myself has a much shorter shelf life than a Whitewater Wipeout, where I’m battling the entire globe.
The developers said they had originally tried to make this game with humans instead of penguins, but it looked “so depressing.” Changing to penguins, especially with the 1-bit, black-and-white Playdate screen (penguin colors!), let them make characters that were very expressive and fun with a relatively simple sprite. Oh, and they’re voice-acted, too, along with the bird that’ll fly through the screen on the later levels and steal your penguins right out of your elevator. Maybe “voice” acted isn’t the right word, but they definitely make silly sounds that a human first made into a microphone. You’ll hear these sounds most when you don’t drop a penguin off on time, and it grumbles as it gets off on the next floor, and then continues to grumble as it slowly waddles all the way to the edge of the building. Worst part: you can’t move the elevator while it’s grumbling away, but the timer will keep counting down. It’s very important that you deliver the penguin to its destination on time.
Overall, Flipper Lifter is a great pick-up-and-play game and a good choice to show to someone who doesn’t “get” the Playdate and its crank-controlled potential. It’s not meant to be played forever, and it won’t be. But for ten minutes or so while you’re on the train or at jury duty and just want something to take every bit of your attention while you move penguins around a space station? Perfect.
The only real problem? The elevator moves the opposite direction from what I expect from cranking through games in the Playdate menu! Note to self if I ever make a Playdate game: let the player decide which crank direction moves the action on screen “up.”
(Included for free as part of Season One.)