Off-Planet Dreams
Off-Planet Dreams is a game that feels like a riddle. I can’t think of many games I could describe this way.
It is a platformer where you cannot see the ground, and each time you die is a learning opportunity. There is no punishment for falling off the bottom of the screen, but it does keep a running tally of your deaths. You can keep bashing your head against the wall trying to remember where the holes are (there’s a sort of minimalist grid background to project what’s in your mind’s eye onto the screen), but there are also options that let you “peek” at the area around you, or “paint” the floors that you’ve touched. The paint sticks from one death to the next, and I definitely played the whole game with paint mode on.
You can pick your own difficulty, though! It’s part of the charm of Off-Planet Dreams, and there will definitely be some masochists that don’t want to use any of the helpful options, instead trying for the “pure” (but brutal) base game settings. Personally, I know that if we didn’t have these easier ways to play, I would’ve never beaten it. Adding paint to the floors you touch makes the whole thing much more accessible, and this game is really worth seeing through to the end. There are SURPRISES which I will not spoil here.
Developer Ledbetter Games (you know, from ART&.. More!) made a sort of prototype for OPD called 1-1(bit) that I couldn’t make it that far into without getting frustrated. I liked the concept (based off an LED-based game – learn about this in Uncrank’d issue 5, coming soon!), but I didn’t have the cognitive capacity. This fully realized version… softens the edges a little. But the edges are still there, especially as you advance further into the game.
It was made in Pulp, but the movement is so smooth in a way that I’ve never seen done in Pulp before; it’s really impressive. This style of smooth Pulp movement was apparently created by Nick Sr. and released on the Playdate Squad Discord – love the collaboration of this community!
That said, you can really start seeing some of the limits of Pulp being hit in all of Ledbetter’s games. Things like the ART series and other dev’s games like Resonant Tale do things in Pulp that it was never intended for, and I will always love seeing tiny platforms stretched to unrecognizable shapes. Playdate games themselves have come so far in the little time it’s been alive in the world, and we’re at the point where you can do concepts that have never really been attempted, and you can do them with 1 single bit. That’s what’s happening in Off-Planet Dreams.
I don’t want to spoil it, but… things change, and I don’t just mean that the platform puzzles get harder. The last half of this game will stick with me for a long, long time (and don’t forget Nightmare Mode!). You should play this, and please don’t be scared to use some of the easy mode options. Don’t let pride keep you from experiencing the whole thing!
(Releasing September 24, 2024, on Catalog. Thanks to Ledbetter for providing me with a pre-release copy!)