If you want to play the next game from the team that made Into the Breach, you’ll need a Playdate

The Playdate has been a lightning rod for critical darling game developers to do something weird and funky, like Lucas Pope’s take on Papers, Please about a bar on Mars, and now the team behind Into the Breach and FTL: Faster Than Light is joining the fun with an exclusive title of its own.

At last week’s Playdate Update livestream, a whole bevy of exclusive games were teased for the micro-console’s second season, one of which is Fulcrum Defender: a crank-operated shoot ’em up from Subset Games.

In the livestream, Subset co-founder Jay Ma said: “The basic gameplay is simple: you just aim with the crank and shoot … my goal for Fulcrum Defender was to recreate some of the fun of the survivors genre of games, while taking advantage of the joy that is the Playdate’s crank.”

Jay Ma continued in the stream to say that she had no intentions of finishing the game when she started making it as a “form of self-therapy” while dealing with the effects of long Covid, but that it turned into a chance to prove to herself she could still finish and release a game despite her health struggles.

It’s certainly less ambitious than something like Into the Breach, but I admit I’m curious how it feels to aim with a crank. Like previous Playdate releases, the new season will be drip fed to players two games at a time once it comes out, and will include 12 games, most of which haven’t been shown off just yet.

I know I’m liable to lose my PC gamer card if I don’t shun console exclusives on principle, but the Playdate is everything I think a console ought to be: a unique chunk of hardware that facilitates development which might not otherwise happen. Sure, I could get an analog crank for my PC, but I imagine life’s a lot easier as a crank-minded developer when you can be sure your entire audience has a device with one bolted to the side. Its handheld, low-power nature also makes it perfect for arcadey score attack games like Fulcrum Defender, which I feel like major console publishers haven’t prioritized since the Dreamcast went belly-up.

Fulcrum Defender is available in the Playdate’s Season 2 bundle, which releases May 29.