Playdate Officially Announced; New Handheld Platform Is Coming in 2020

While most of the big companies in gaming industry are trying to do their best on next-gen consoles and expanse their presence at cloud gaming and hosting streaming platforms, creative ideas on crafting new experiences haven’t died yet, especially with newly announced Playdate that’s offering a whole new way to play games among handheld platforms.

The publisher behind Firewatch is attempting to launch its own handheld platform in 2020 and it works in a whole new way to anything you’ve seen so far. Yes! Just like most of the gaming devices it features arrow buttons along with “A” and “B” keys, but those aren’t the things that make Playdate unique. Actually it’s the crank on the right side that adds a new functionality to the platform, through which you can control different things like “time” in the launch title of Playdate.

Panic’s first hardware launch features a small black and white screen, headphone jack, USB-C port, Bluetooth connection and Wi-Fi. The platform will receive a new game each week, makes it to get a “season of games” in 12 weeks. First title to release is Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure in which you should control the time and animations by the crank. With rotating it forward or backward you will be able to roll the time back and forth in the game. Here is a brief teaser and description for it:

This game uses the crank exclusively to control the flow of time, backwards and forwards. Your goal? Get Crankin’ to his date with Crankette while avoiding an ever-increasing series of ridiculous obstacles — obstacles that aren’t affected by the time control.

Playdate is set to be released in 2020 and it will cost you $149.

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