XTRIS

Like Pup Cup, here’s another game with ~1-minute rounds that will take every bit of your reflexes. Like HEXA, you need to almost turn off your brain and react on instinct. And like… Celeste’s unofficial port? This game got its start on PICO-8.

XTRIS is a concise game about catching the X as many times as you can in a short time limit. There are only three differently shaped levels, one unattainable goal, and online leaderboards. Each level is a different shape, and your cursor wraps around when moving off the edge on one side or the other. An X appears randomly in one square, and your job is just to navigate to it, earning one point, then it’ll move to another square. I hope I’m not underselling it - this has fidget-spinner levels of “one more round.”

It feels like… playing Wacky Gator at the arcade growing up. The gator pops his head out and you hit him with the mallet as fast as you can. XTRIS distills that feeling into a much more minimalist environment. The screen contains only a “tetromino,” “bridge,” or “squiggle” shaped level, and you zip around as fast as you can, catching that X quickly so you can rank high on the online leaderboards. There are unlockables for doing well, which will change the X to a smiley face or a crown or a heart. But there’s just the one goal: grab the shape as many times as you can before the timer runs out.

There’s also a zen mode, where you can just keep grabbing that X forever. The watermarked high score in the background will keep going up for as long as you want. I can totally see myself doing this on a subway into the big city, no thoughts on my way to work.

It’s not a huge game, but it makes me wonder what the top possible score could be? Around 100 points seems like a pretty good amount, but we also keep breaking 100-meter dash records at the Olympics year after year. There has to be a limit to human performance, somewhere. We’re what, like a quarter-second away from a perfect original NES Super Mario Bros. speedrun? That does have a lowest possible time, though. To what heights can our thumbs take us in XTRIS on the Playdate, where there are no limits?

(Releasing February 25, 2025, on Catalog and Itch. Copy provided by developer.)