Saturday Edition

Narrative games on the Playdate are not like movies that you can watch with your significant other – there’s no sharing of the experience. It’s more like reading a book. You get to experience this story alone, with just your imagination and your mind to guide you. You can talk about the game later with someone else that played it, for sure. But while it’s happening? It’s just you and the tiny 1-bit screen, going on an adventure.

Saturday Edition is like games I’ve played before, but at the same time it’s like nothing else in Season One. It’s a narrative game with light puzzles where everything needs to be done in a specific order, and there’s not much leeway. There’s no time limit, or death, which in my eyes puts it above similar-feeling games like… maybe Rise of the Dragon is the closest corollary I could come up with. I never was able to finish that one. Saturday Edition, though? This one is just right.

You play as a 40-ish guy named John Kornfield that was once abducted by aliens and lived among them for four years (or were you?). This game is set 10 years after your return. You’ve rebuilt your life a little bit and now work with your friend Tyler, installing electronic security systems. When people start disappearing like you did years before, there is a renewed interest in your story. Are these alien abductions? Were you telling the truth? Is it up to you to be the one that figures it out?

The actual gameplay is very Sierra/LucasArts adventure game, but more focused with its locations. There’s only a handful of places you’ll visit, and each no more than a few screens each. It’s side-scrolling, and it’s very obvious when you find something that you can interact with, because it gives you an extreme close-up in an inset pop-up window (these are animated and very cool, showing just PART of a person’s face, for example). The dialogue is also snappy, with only one line shown at a time on the tiny Playdate screen, preventing walls of text and keeping the pace deliberate.

This is one thing that really struck me about this game: how deliberate everything was. The main character doesn’t walk fast, but the locations are small. The dialogue is one line at a time and can’t be skipped through, and there are points where John will take a moment and just reply with a “…” to let the words breathe. There’s also an inner voice in italics sometimes, letting you into Kornfield’s head, seeing what he says versus what he means. The one-day-at-a-time-for-a-week pacing of the game reminds me how easy it is to get not much done over the course of a day, but how little steps each day can lead to big growth over a week’s time. That’s something I’ve always struggled to reconcile in my real life. Just do a little thing often and eventually get big results.

One thing that felt unique to this game is the notes system, which must have been done somewhere before this, but I’m not exactly an adventure game connoisseur so I’m not sure. When you find something worth asking about, you make a little note on a piece of paper, which gets added to your inventory with whatever else you’re carrying around. Want to ask someone about it? Show them the note. When you’ve asked everything needed about a particular topic, you crumple up the note. It stays in your inventory so you can reference it later, but you won’t need to ask anyone else about it. It’s a great system so you don’t have to keep using every inventory item on every single character you meet.

Oh, and the characters. John had a bad time for a long time (local media still calls him “the man from the stars” and everyone in town knows his story, name, and face), yet he still has friends that have stuck by him, and you even make some new ones. It’s nice to have someone you can talk to, whether you’re puzzling things over in your head or just feeling alone in a big world. There’s one interaction with a writer, in particular, that will stick with me for a long time. “Stick with the alien story,” he says to John. “People like it.” Is that what he thinks? Is that what everyone thinks about you? You soon find: not everyone.

Having this site is a great reason for me to go back and catch up on the Season One games I missed during the normal schedule, and many agree that this might be the best one. It’s going to be hard to top, that’s for sure. Not many games have a story that really sticks with me long after the credits roll, but I know this one will.

Oh, and the crank? All it does is make John do a little dance. Because why not? You can be an excellent Playdate game without shoehorning unnecessary control schemes in just because you feel like you have to.

(Get it included for free as part of Season One.)