Taxi Trouble
Taxi Trouble feels like a mix between Crazy Taxi and what might have been the first banned video game, 1976’s Death Race. In Crazy Taxi, you drive your cab around, pick up passengers, and drop them off within a very short time limit. In Death Race, you run over very human-looking (by 1976 standards) zombies with your car, and then they turn into a tombstone. Hit that tombstone and your car crashes for a game over.
You’re not supposed to run over your passengers in Taxi Trouble, but I didn’t quite figure this out at first. There’s a playfield that’s about the size of four Playdate screens in a square, and a countdown timer at the top of your screen, next to your score. Pick up the flashing pedestrian only (their location is indicated by an arrow pointing from your car), and drop them off at a spot indicated somewhere else on the playfield. When you drop them off, they’ll stay in that spot and become an obstacle. Get outta the way! As you drop off more and more passengers, you’ll have more and more pedestrians blocking parts of the screen. Hit one and they splatter, and your car blows up, and it’s game over. Or, if you drive off the edge of the playfield, it’s also game over. The drift-heavy handling takes a little while to get used to, but within a few games you’ll be skidding around pedestrians like a pro.
The pedestrians you splat leave their bloodstains from one game to the next unless you manually clear the screen from within the menu, and your skid marks stay, too. This adds an extra degree of challenge as you replay round after round. And that’s the whole game! Each drop-off gives you more time added to your clock, but you’ll eventually run out or blow up. Your high score unlocks different hats for your drop offs, and it’ll take quite a bit of practice to get good enough to unlock them all, although it’s technically possible to get them all on your first run. (Good luck with that.)
All in all, it’s perfect for a few very intense minutes on your Playdate. Each run starts simply and escalates predictably, but the roadblocks that keep piling on, along with a shorter and shorter time limit, keeps you from ever truly mastering the game. Maybe that’s part of what led one Discord user to call Taxi Trouble “the single most underrated/slept on game on the Playdate.” Sleep on it no more. I’ll see you on the global leaderboards!
(Released November 5, 2023, on Itch, and January 16, 2024, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)