You’re Gonna Miss the Bus!
You’re Gonna Miss the Bus! is an endless runner where you try to catch the bus because you’re late for school. You never actually catch the bus (because then it wouldn’t be an ENDLESS runner), but this is the most Bit.Trip Runner we’re likely to ever get on the Playdate. This was actually why/how I found it – I felt like playing a Runner game and I’d heard nothing but good things about this one.
It’s a little simpler than Bit.Trip Runner: you can only jump, double jump, and slide as you automatically run to the right, dodging various obstacles for as long as you can. There’s no kicking or dancing here. There are trampolines sometimes, though, and birds to duck under, and you can cut off a too-long jump by canceling into a slide. That feels cool once you get the hang of the physics and the length of the slides. You don’t jump and dodge to the beat like in Runner, but the soundtrack is funky and good. The instant restarts when you trip over a box or fall into an open manhole keep you trying one more run. And there’s a bunch of achievements I’ll almost definitely never collect. (Run HALF A MILE, not happening.)
You can feel yourself improving as you play, and there is a practice mode to figure out the right way to get through certain obstacle patterns. There’s a one-shot mode, or normal gives you three lives, and you can recover them after losing one by finding hearts or collecting five pages of protagonist Henry’s lost homework. It’s very straightforward, but the controls are tight and your incremental improvement feels great. What more could you ask for out of a game like this?