Wirewalk
Wirewalk()↳ is like if The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was a lot more compact and set in the Mega Man Battle Network world. It has dungeons. It has secrets. It has what is basically a hookshot with a twist. Unlike Link, though, you are a hacker with a baseball bat, and apparently the only person trying to fix a virus that is quickly starting to affect the whole world, .hack style. You do this by finding “codes” that will let you jack into dungeons from your home PC and delete the corruption within.
This game is not as big as a Zelda game – the whole thing took me about three hours – but it’s a lot more meaty than, say, Castaway. There are lots of little things to discover in the not-too-big world (including some well-hidden cosmetic frames for around the screen), and the items are not direct copies of Zelda items, either. There’s a hookshot, but it also lets you spin around the pole you latch onto. There’s a ball item that you can throw, but you can also curve your throwing direction to solve puzzles. There’s a pickaxe instead of a hammer, and it serves many purposes that would take multiple items in Zelda.
Wearing the Zelda pedigree on its sleeve is not a bad thing. It was a formative series for many of us, and other similar games on Playdate like Resonant Tale prove that this tiny yellow console can do big-boy games when given the right developer, some time, and some good ideas. But it also means that if you didn’t like the 2D Zelda games, this one probably won’t change your mind about this kind of game. There’s a little more puzzle-solving than combat in the dungeons in this one, but the smaller scope cuts down on the sense of exploration and discovery. There are only three dungeons spread across a small overworld instead of the eight that classic Zeldas contained, and far fewer items, which were a little cumbersome to change with the Playdate’s menu button, as well. It does have a tricky Water Temple-esque level, too, where the puzzles will have you walking waaaaaay over there to flip a switch before coming back to your now-open path.
If you’re looking for Playdate’s answer to The Legend of Zelda, with much fancier graphics than the Pulp-based Resonant Tale, this is a great pick! And on a system that skews more toward short-burst games, it’s nice to have something a little more substantial. It won’t dethrone Link’s Awakening from its status as best portable game of its kind, but for $7, you get a whole lot of game and a new-yet-familiar-feeling world to explore. And the developer is already working on a sequel!
(Released December 10, 2024, on Catalog. Also released September 23, 2021, on Steam, where you can try a free demo. Here’s a neat article about the porting process.)