Though not an uncommon occurrence, I enjoy seeing when indie developers juice up a game and slap a DX on the end of the title for rerelease. My first time seeing this was with the excellent Super Hiking League DX. The rerelease added great features and gave it a shot at redemption after a pricing issue on Steam caused problems for the developer. Since then, I’ve assumed there’s a story behind that “DX” suffix, one that tells of redemption or success as a game moves from one platform to a bigger audience.
Such is the case for Ratcheteer DX, a rerelease of a Playdate game. I do not own a Playdate myself, but I have kept an eye out whenever news drops because it fascinates me as a device. It’s a curiosity in the gaming world in that owners receive two different bite-sized games weekly when they subscribe to its service. It’s like Game Pass, but with far less baggage and shorter games. You can buy games a la carte to fill your library too. But its real draw is the crank.
The Playdate website emphasises that the crank is not a gimmick, and it’s not a way to charge the Playdate battery, but rather another input, more like a button on the D-pad than a superfluous addition. Even not owning a Playdate, I found this to be true. It was a phantom pain in my time with Ratcheteer DX.
This is a top-down, old-school action-adventure game where you complete dungeons to gain a new ability or tool that will then become required to progress the game. Several of these mechanics, if not all, would play with an immensely satisfying feeling if I could have used the crank to do them. It’s a weird sense of gamer melancholy; I never had the Playdate experience here, but just knowing that the inputs benefited from the Playdate’s unique design, I seemed to understand and then long for that experience.
Because without it, Ratcheteer DX struggled to stand out.
You play as the titular ratcheteer, which is an extremely cool made-up title. As a mechanic, you set out to repair certain stations across the map that are struggling due to Astrals, an alien race disrupting life for humanity. There’s a satisfying chunk of world-building baked into the game. It’s a post-apocalyptic setting where various factions have splintered off from a greater collective, and each have distinct opinions and traditions for survival in this hostile world. While the idea may not sound original, the execution was engaging.
What is remarkable about the writing is that it, like the game itself, is brief, but the word count doesn’t limit the detail and imagination available to ponder. It also helps that the game has many, many texts scattered around to read from, so at your leisure you can read up on the current situation.
Well, not entirely at your leisure. Let me qualify that. Like many older games, scouring bookshelves and speaking to every NPC is required to make progress. If you want to understand the world, you’ll need to read everything you come across. Mainlining the game is less exciting, as it feels like ping-ponging between unclear exposition to advance.
Obscurity is a core design mechanic, in addition to defining how the NPCs guide you through your quest. The feeling recalls a much older video game logic, one that’s less popular contemporarily but typically held in high regard for nostalgic gamers. It’s less endearing here. Ratcheteer DX expects that the player will thoroughly experiment with mechanics. Whenever you get a new tool or item, there will be the basic explanation of its fundamental use. But how it interacts with enemies, bosses, or the environments – that’s up to you to figure out. Sometimes it will toss a clue your way, but it’s usually vague or riddle-like.
For a game that clocks in around 4 hours, I found this obscurity to be an obstacle rather than meaningful brainwork for the player. The brevity of the dungeons suggests getting through the game quickly, without many hitches. The many minutes spent without guidance trying to piece together how to damage a boss or poor tutorialisation on how to use an ability in a new environment weighed down the pacing for what is otherwise a speedy game.
For example, in an early dungeon where you gain the ability to jump, you learn from the ability’s description that you’ll have to jump on some hard-shelled enemies to roll them over, expose their weak bellies, and then use the wrench-blade’s attacks to land damage. It seemed like a natural progression for this to be the primary way to stun and damage the corresponding boss. Well, that is not the case. You need another approach to defeat that one, and the way to accomplish that is never explained or required in its lair.
It’s entirely possible that this is player error, that I simply didn’t recognise the patterns and subtle design hints that pointed me towards a clean victory. However, instances like this began to pile up. As Ratcheteer DX continued, I felt it drag. Frustrations began to mount with the never-ending winks and unclear guidance. When the game caught a current, things snapped into place and felt smooth, but those moments were few and far between. More often than not, I just wanted to know how to handle the gameplay consistently. Something straightforward would have eliminated much of the friction I felt.
But those rough patches were present even in basic movement. The jump felt inconsistent or meticulous in terms of its input reactivity. There are plenty of traversal sections where I struggled to feel out and time how to skip between platforms. I regularly switched between using the thumbstick and d-pad for movement because I couldn’t tell if the game was better played with 8-point direction or free-flowing with the thumbstick. In short, a lot of the game’s best designs, like the drill ability, were overshadowed by moment-to-moment gameplay that felt stale at best and hostile at worst.
I wonder how much of this played better on the Playdate. Ratcheteer DX is filled to the brim with creativity and nuance in its exploration. There’s always something on to search for, and I love the minimalist but informative map provided as you uncover more information about each section of the game.
By poking around the various corners, be they in caves or houses, the player will unlock a translation of a rune, which will allow you to decipher messages later on. This was all immensely enjoyable and pieced together a world I wanted to care about. One of the final sections of the game rewards you for finding these rune translations, in a way that pleasantly caught me off guard.
There’s clearly a brilliant game in Ratcheteer DX, but I could not find the fun to let it wash over me, but rather I watched as those moments broke like waves on a shore, leaving me wondering which version of this game balanced the best over the underwhelming.
