Garbage Scow Captain
I’ve played a lot of Scenic Route Software games this week. In fact, I’ve played every single one of them that was released on the Playdate, all in a row. So I had to resort to playing Scenic Route games that haven’t been released yet! Garbage Scow Captain is set to launch on September 10, 2024, on Catalog, and the developer kindly sent me an early, unfinished-but-still-fun copy so we can end Scenic Route Week with style.
First off, I had no idea what a “scow” was. Turns out it’s a sort of dinghy used to transport garbage? And “Garbage Scow Captain” was a ranking in the old Atari game Star Raiders that you could earn when you really weren’t that good at flying (or maybe you were? None of the rankings were all that complimentary). That game was a first-person space shooter. This one is quite a bit different: it’s side scrolling, and your job is to repel space garbage out of the spaceway. Otherwise, ships more important than yours might run into it and get hurt. You don’t have any weapons to accomplish this – it’s all physics and repulsor beams.
The trickiest part here, and what takes the most getting used to, is exactly how your thrusters repel space debris out of their wake. To move up, you push up. Makes sense. But your thrusters push down to move the ship up. So you cruise down this space highway towards asteroids, space junk, Playdate Cinematic Universe special guests, and aliens that shoot at you, and you dodge out of the way from them at the last second, letting your thruster wake push them off the top or bottom of the screen. The longer you thrust, the bigger the push. Each piece of space stuff you clear off the road without missing one adds to your combo, and that’s how you get the big points and can top the online leaderboards.
You have a shield that can be activated at any time but has a short battery, and a repulsor beam that shoots out in front of you. It won’t clear anything off the playfield, but it will push things directly in front of you forward a bit, helping you maintain your combo as you juggle all the debris. Oh, and sometimes a space whale (known as a “nebulorca” in the game) sneaks up from behind you. It will push everything out of the way, including you, so watch out! You can restore your ship’s health and add to your combo by picking up random crates, too, but they can also be destroyed and rendered useless, so grab them quickly.
There are three levels: novice, seasoned, and expert. Each has a set length displayed by a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, and you need to clear 90% of the space debris by the end to advance to the next level. Get that percentage really high and you get a bonus at the end of the stage. There are also daily challenges with their own leaderboards to keep you coming back. My favorite was “Pedal to the Metal,” where the accelerator is stuck at 100% and you just have to dodge things the best you can. Oh, and you can use that accelerator for short bursts during normal play, too; it’s handy to dodge aliens blasting at you.
Garbage Scow Captain has that same Scenic Route charm that their other Playdate games have had, but it’s a lot more old-time-arcade-game than most of them. Moreso than with most of their games, I can really feel myself getting better the longer I play, and that’s good – this pre-release version is the only time I’ll be able to top the leaderboards! I’ll update this post after the final game comes out with some additional thoughts on the final-month improvements, but it felt like a fully fleshed out (and fun) game already!
Get it on Catalog on September 10, 2024!
(And side note: this is the FIFTIETH (50th) game on this site since it launched less than five months ago. Thanks for sticking around! I’m going to figure out a way to sort the games by more than just publish date, and hopefully some other fun things, too. Thanks, Scenic Route, for letting me play all your games in a row! Let’s see where we go next. And yeah I know I need to finish reviewing all the Season One games, but there’s just so much cool new stuff happening every day in the Playdate world and I get distracted!)