Beginning in May, Season 2 offered a smaller collection — 12 games for $39, plus the intriguing FMV-based Blippo Plus — yet it started promisingly. Since its launch, the lineup has expanded, including a variety of genres. Highlights include a post-apocalyptic adventure titled The Whiteout and Shadowgate PD, a point-and-click exploration game that’s a remake of a classic from the ‘80s. The new batch of games effectively showcases the Playdate’s diverse potential.

What stands out the most are the titles that ingeniously utilize the handheld’s iconic crank. Take Tiny Turnip, for instance, a climbing game where you control a turnip with arms. The game mechanics involve using face buttons to grip and the crank to navigate, which initially felt unusual due to its novelty. However, once I got the hang of it, cranking through challenging landscapes became second nature. The experience of smoothly journeying through the game by rotating a crank is immensely gratifying.

Taria & Como offers something similar within a more typical side-scrolling platformer. You can move and jump through a pixel art world, but in order to navigate the most perilous areas, you’re aided by a sort of drone / grappling hook that’s aimed with the crank. You fire it off and then swing yourself where you need to be. You can also use the crank to pull yourself up or down. Taria & Como is a relatively slow-paced physics-based platformer with some challenging puzzles, and the inclusion of the crank adds a satisfying layer of tactility to the experience.

Perhaps my favorite game is also arguably the strangest. It’s called Long Puppy, and it’s almost like a spiritual successor to Noby Noby Boy (albeit one not developed by Keita Takahashi, who is off doing his own weird stuff). The goal is simple: you are a dog who needs to fetch a ball. But it always seems to be in some hard-to-reach spot, and the only way to get to it is to stretch. In order to stretch longer, you need to eat lots of food. And so each level becomes a race to eat as much as you can so you can get to the ball before a weirdly angry ghost dog shows up.

Naturally, you use the crank to both grow and shrink, so even though Long Puppy is a game about a pup, you move more like a caterpillar inching its way through the levels to gobble up everything they can quickly. Again, it takes some getting used to, but the time limits forced me to get really good at stretching and it was a blast. Also, at the end of each level you use the crank to go poo.

Of course, these games would’ve still been enjoyable if I stumbled across them in the Catalog store. But there’s something exciting about the big moment the Playdate seasons create. Each week I anticipate something new, and am never really sure what it will actually be. It could be more channels for a bizarre fictional television service, or it could be the most challenging (and adorable) game of fetch I’ve ever played. That steady cadence of weird and fun makes the Playdate much harder to forget about.