Whitewater Wipeout (Playdate)

The Playdate is certainly a game console meant for enthusiasts, the small rectangular handheld having black and white “1-bit” visuals, no GPU, and a hand crank on the side to play games with. Still, it is a little surprising to see one of the first two games you’re presented with when turning on the system is something like the arcadey surfing game Whitewater Wipeout. While mass market appeal was never the intent of this delightfully quirky system, the arcadey surfing game that is put forward first of over twenty games included with the console purchase feels like an odd introduction because it isn’t exactly a gentle introduction or really too forthright in explaining itself.

When you first start to play Whitewater Wipeout, you’ll see one of the randomly selected intro messages along the lines of “Crank to Burn” or “Crank It”, which is not really what the player should be doing to control their surfer. Rather than rotating the crank rapidly as the phrases and even a small visual on screen suggest, movement in Whitewater Wipeout is actually about properly positioning the crank in the direction you want your surfer to travel. Point it downwards and they’ll begin their ride down into the wave, point the crank towards yourself and they’ll turn to ride within the wave, and angle it upwards when you’re ready to crest the top of the wave and start trying to earn some points by doing tricks.  Once you have leapt up above the water, you’ll then finally want to crank with a bit of urgency, as the two ways you’ll be earning points in this simple surfing game is by getting high up into the air and rotating your board before you land back on the wave.

While based specifically on the surfing found in California Games for the Atari Lynx, Whitewater Wipeout derives much of its challenge from the fact the success of your performance is derived from proper crank control. You’ll need to build up momentum properly so you can launch yourself high from the top of the wave and make sure your board is angled down properly so you safely land back inside it, the player needing to get a feel for how many spins they can justify while airborne and how much to turn the crank so they don’t wipe out. Whitewater Wipeout doesn’t come out and explain the crank movement system even in the small tips that pop up and its sometimes rude one-liners after you fall off your board certainly don’t help make a player receptive to the early learning process, but while at first you’ll be lucky to earn even double digits as you acclimate to how to properly get air, soon the knack for the game’s movement system will let you earn thousands of points in a single run and start making meaningful marks on the game’s local and online high score tables.

In some ways this does make Whitewater Wipeout make some sense as an introductory game to the system, since mastery of the crank and it’s manipulation becoming second nature are key to success. The objectives are also pretty simple here, since the only trick you can perform is spinning your board. The points for height when leaping above the wave are often inconsequential compared to the totals you can rack up with spins and combos, and there is some incentive for risk-taking because you can start comboing your jumps for more points but only if each jump consists of at least a double spin. Triple spins and even the rare quadruple spin are certainly more valuable but harder to pull off, although sometimes Whitewater Wipeout seems oddly merciful when your landing looks like it shouldn’t have worked out while other times you might swear you were safe while the game disagrees. So long as you don’t get greedy though you shouldn’t run into these fuzzier moments of what counts as a safe landing, but Whitewater Wipeout still feels like the kind of game where you can have an exhilarating round where you are chaining together constant triple spins only for your next life to have you wipe out while barely hitting the hundreds, the physicality of the crank perhaps not gelling with the other relevant part of the game’s controls.

To get additional height when jumping out of a wave, you’ll want to press up on the directional pad. Not only is this element vital to gaining early speed so you can start performing tricks sooner, but it can definitely be the difference on whether a jump allows a full extra spin. While you can also press left or right on the directional pad to turn in that direction more quickly, it’s not quite as vital and you can get large scores without it, but the help getting higher in the air feels too important to ignore and thus leads to a little issue with the console itself. Turning the crank quickly while airborne is key to getting in the spins without wiping out, and there are certainly ways to hold the Playdate that make it more conducive to such rapid rotation. However, getting the directional pad only slightly involved and yet in such an important manner means you will have to devote one hand to pressing up with frequent enough regularity, playing Whitewater Wipeout a bit more uncomfortable and inconsistent because of it.

A round of Whitewater Wipeout lets you add together scores from three different attempts, and by pressing the B button twice you can rapidly quit a round if you want to give it a better shot. Despite the graphical limitations, the surfer riding the wave actually moves pretty smoothly in response to even the slightest angles of the crank, and when listening to the official Playdate podcast on the game I wasn’t too surprised to learn an artist usually used to 3D modeling was responsible for the very clean movement transitions of the two-dimensional character. Besides poor landings, there are three other ways to wipe out, although their danger levels vary. Going to low on the wave will knock you off your board, and sometimes in the low parts of a wave a shark might swim by, although in my efforts to deliberately trigger its appearance it felt hard to hit it even on purpose. Managing how low you go into a wave is vital to building up speed so these hazards near the bottom make some sense, but the breaker is going to be your main concern. The point where the wave curls inward is too dangerous to ride on and likely to make you wipe out quickly if you can’t escape it in a hurry, the right side of the wave always coming towards you as a consistent pressure that you’ll need to keep ahead of. You can ride the wave normally to try and get some distance from it and things like the shark or the bird you can hit for double points usually appear once you’ve been on the wave for a while, but this danger is also a wise way of preventing the player from far too easily chaining together spins since otherwise you could just find a comfortable rhythm. It also adds a bit more importance to angling your jump right so you don’t throw yourself backwards and let the crashing wave gain ground on you. While it would be nice if there were more tricks to attempt or other considerations, the pure focus on crank movement was probably the wiser direction considering its slightly shaky elements, too many complications likely to turn failures into frustrations that would discourage you from climbing back on the board until you’ve figured out the best ways to move.

THE VERDICT: While it inevitably gets off to a rough start, the surfing in Whitewater Wipeout can find its flow once you get a feel for how to handle the Playdate’s crank. A round where you’re constantly stringing together triple spins is certainly satisfying and the difference in points compared to your weaker performances definitely helps it feel like a suitable payoff to learning the game’s ropes, but the crank movement and pressing up on the directional pad for height don’t feel like the most compatible of controls. It is a simple game once you come to understand it despite the game not helping with the learning process, but your thrilling runs can still make it worth playing a few runs now and then to test and see if things will click into place for a high scoring round.

And so, I give Whitewater Wipeout for Playdate…

An OKAY rating. It does seem a bit strange this game was put forth for the player first in the Playdate’s first pair of included games, considering it feels very much like a “love it or hate it” experience… or maybe even a “love it AND hate it” one. A little more directness on how the game should be played would likely do wonders for its first impression or even just more tips that are direct control explanations instead of situational explanations of things like the rarely seen bird, but Whitewater Wipeout does benefit from the fact that learning the controls isn’t the main challenge. Getting high scores does come down to getting a feel for how to ride the waves and identifying how many spins feel safe and even starting to reliably manage your momentum and turning well doesn’t necessarily mean every round is going to lead to massive scores. At the same time, some of this does feel a touch tied to the game including the directional pad in the controls when perhaps it would have been better off left out entirely. You might need to build up more momentum naturally or the game would have to adjust jumping a bit so you could better clear the crest of the wave without needing to also press up, but it would help focus in this experience that is already fairly lasered in on just the core challenge of spinning as much as you can while airborne to rack up points.

Whitewater Wipeout is a fairly quick game to dive into from time to time without too many complicated considerations that would make it a considerable time investment, so perhaps that is why it is one of Playdate’s first feet forward, but the common truism that handheld systems should have games accommodate the fact they might be played for short periods doesn’t feel like its a necessary factor when designing for an enthusiast console. You’re already turning a hand crank rather wildly so it’s not like the Playdate is aiming to be some mass market console you’ll see people playing on the bus, but Whitewater Wipeout doesn’t feel like it was designed to be the first impression and instead just ended up with that role. Introducing the game’s controls better would still be a wise approach for any game regardless of how the player comes into it, but Whitewater Wipeout does at least lean into the crank controls pretty strongly and creates an experience that, while having direct inspiration from California Games, also inevitably plays differently because of its choice of console. It’s a suitable showcase of what the Playdate is and can be even if it still has its little quirks that maybe hamper is potential as an addictive score chaser, but it also is reliable enough that even if you might find other Playdate titles a bit too eccentric or short, you’ll always have Whitewater Wipeout to go back to for something quick, distinct, and with a good bit of longevity since it always feels like you can improve your performance just a bit more even if it doesn’t always pan out that way.