Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure (Playdate)
While the quirky little console that is the Playdate was on my radar for a while, what made me sit up and take notice of it was the confirmation that Lucas Pope, creator of such imaginative games as Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, was developing a game for it. At the time of writing, Pope’s game is still unreleased, but he wasn’t the only auteur who seemed excited by the specific style and control method the Playdate put forward. Keita Takahashi, designer of the delightful Katamari Damacy, created a game that is included with the Playdate’s first season of included titles, but while Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure definitely puts forth a creative way to utilize the crank, it can feel like the actual game design isn’t a great fit for it.
The title Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure does not refer to an adventure through time but instead a poor fellow’s unique method of movement. Crankin appears to be a man made of toy blocks, but luckily he’s found a similarly composed lady named Crankette and managed to set up a date with her for 3 o’clock sharp. However, Crankin can’t help but sleep in, waking up at 3 on the dot and quickly sprinting out of his home to try and make it to Crankette to see if the date can be salvaged. Crankette unfortunately is none too pleased with his tardiness, which she expresses in a few different, sometimes extreme ways like suplexing him or kicking him in the groin. Despite her reactions though, she does seem to be willing to give him many more chances, the game’s 50 levels all contextualized as a new attempt at a date only for Crankin to sleep in until 3 once again. While it can seem a little rough that Crankin constantly suffers at the hands of his date, the game’s official site does say that Crankin enjoys Crankette’s violent overreactions, although each stage does have a point where even Crankette won’t abide how tardy her date is if you don’t make it to her within a reasonable time frame.
Your part in supporting Crankin’s masochistic tendencies comes in the form of the titular time travel. When you spin the Playdate’s crank forward, Crankin will begin his sprint, the speed of your turning determining how quickly he runs. However, Crankin is easily distracted by things in his path, stopping to smell flowers, sitting down for quick drinks, and leaping up to hang onto metal bars. You can’t stop him from doing these things, but in this side-scroller, such actions are not just distractions but also Crankin’s key to survival. His path to Crankette often has aggressive wildlife like birds, pigs, and butterflies as well as dangers like lightning he’ll need to watch out for, but you lack any way to control Crankin besides the crank. However, by spinning the crank backwards, Crankin’s own movements will reverse like you were rewinding him, and if you stop spinning entirely, Crankin will stay in place even if that might leave him floating in midair. As such, the way to avoid lethal collisions is by maneuvering the crank so that Crankin is in the optimal pose to avoid contact, and things like stopping to smell the flowers will cause him to bend down and allow threats like the birds to pass over harmlessly.
Crankin’s movement is the only thing impacted by the crank, the player needing to react to dangers that move in real time by finding where Crankin needs to be or how he needs to be positioned to keep him alive. Crankette’s impatience does mean you have a limited amount of time in a stage to overcome such obstacles and while at first, turning up around 4 o’clock is going to be a loss, later longer stages thankfully allow for more time despite it then becoming less clear how fast you need to be. Each minute is about a second in real time so speed is still vital, but the actual stage design is where this game concept starts to crumble into a frustrating repetitive mess. If Crankin touches an enemy or hazard with even a pixel of his deliberately tall and awkward body, you’ll immediately die and need to retry the stage. You can do so as many times as it takes, but precision with the crank is vital to avoid light brushes that lead to losing a level just because you were a millimeter off in how you position the crank. Setting Crankin’s poses up just right to let dangers pass safely is the main challenge of the game though even if it is perhaps too touchy about how spot on you need to be in order to clear some dangers, and there are some situations where clearing its exacting standards can be satisfying like a particularly difficult late game date where Crankin needs to constantly rise out of and lower himself back into chairs to avoid birds that are flying high and low in a specific rhythm.
It is the level layouts that really start to make the game’s standards grueling rather than engaging. While warning signs appear on the side of the screen to alert you to incoming enemies, they don’t indicate the exact position and the Playdate’s small screen means not only do things like stampeding pigs appear on-screen too soon for you to really react, it can also be easy to lose track of tiny foes like the slowly strolling living feces. With instant death being the punishment, many levels in Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure end up turning into memorization challenges since you can’t actually anticipate what is ahead. You’ll make it a certain distance into the level, hit the foe you couldn’t react to without the foreknowledge, and be made to replay it and hope you have an idea how to get around the danger next time. However, getting back there is complicated by the game demanding perfect positioning to survive at parts, and this gets particularly irritating in the longer stages which necessitate long strings of spot-on crank turning, periods where you have to turn it quickly but stop at just the right moment, and then even after clearing a bunch of small challenges in that stage, it will still unashamedly blindside you with something to kill you and require you to do it all again.
The movement of everything is consistent in Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure down to the exact paths Crankin takes and when enemies will trigger, but this doesn’t alleviate some other issues like the obfuscation of how Crankin will behave when you’re first figuring out a level. Sometime he will ignore flowers rather than sniffing them for example, but the more irritating inconsistencies emerge from stairs. There are many levels where Crankin will need to climb many intertwining staircases where you can’t really determine if he’ll take a turn to a new set or continue on up the one he was already on until the moment you move him forward, meaning again that you can’t determine how safe his travels are until you throw him in face first hoping that you won’t die. When you find smaller staircases in levels this can be used to some interesting effect as at least the pedestal stairs keep all relevant information on screen at once so you can figure out when to move forward or back, but it is still a trial and error experience, just one where it’s easier to gradually figure out since it’s a self-contained puzzle rather than your means of traversing the entire level. Funnily enough, the easy levels end up feeling a bit hollow when you can just overcome them with constant cranking though, some even appearing rather late in the adventure so it ends up becoming hard to find level designs to enjoy since something about them tends to always feel at least a little off. You can retry previous levels and try to earn a heart symbol next to them on the level select screen for clearing a stage rather quickly, but since it would just be throwing yourself harder at the memorization test, it’s not exactly an enticing extra incentive for sticking with Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure beyond those 50 dates.
THE VERDICT: Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure is definitely meant to test your dexterity in handling the Playdate’s crank, but while its harsh standards for perfection in positioning Crankin properly could have been a compelling challenge, the unfortunate pairing of it with instant death dangers you can’t reasonably react to when first encountered ends up making the game frustratingly hard in the wrong ways. Levels become repetitive slogs as you need to make sure your crank is turned just so only for the game to reward that devotion and precision by sloppily throwing an enemy in your face and asking you to do it all again while accounting for the new danger this time. With more screen real estate Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure could have maybe stripped away the trial and error elements and given you the room to react, but as is, this design approach means you’d have to be as much of a glutton for punishment as Crankin to enjoy this title.
And so, I give Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure for Playdate…
A TERRIBLE rating. The hand crank necessitates the Playdate as the console of choice for Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, and yet the design where all too often something new appears on screen to cheaply kill you could be easily worked around on something with a much larger screen. Being able to plan your forward or reverse movements a little in advance would allow for you to react and better clear levels through the skill in positioning rather than repetitive memorization tests, and there would still be room to figure out things through experimentation since things like the pedestal stairs still would require you to feel out how Crankin will choose to travel up them. Instead though, you’re often denied important details until the split second before they’re relevant meaning you often need to have Crankin already positioned right to survive or else you’ll need to try the whole level over again. With so many stages asking for Crankin to take leaps where he barely avoids brushing over foes or frequent spot-on movements to overcome time sensitive enemy patterns, needing to overcome those trials only to be smacked in the face with something you couldn’t see coming makes the learning process irritating instead of entertaining. If the warning signals were a bit more accurate perhaps that would be a move in the right direction, or if there was a little more room to learn instead of frequent instant deaths, then Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure could better accommodate things instead of leaning so hard into memorization on top of movement perfection. It doesn’t necessarily even need to let you survive a hit and let you clear the level either, if there was just some way to keep moving and figure out the stage before attempting it for real then you could at least get in practice where you aren’t constantly ramming your head against new information you can’t immediately incorporate that is vital to having any success.
Keita Takahashi’s idea of a character who moves forward or back based on the crank’s positioning is one that could have worked well even within this focus on making sure you slip through enemies by maneuvering yourself just so. However, the level layouts lean the game too much towards frequent forced restarts before you even factor in player skill, the memorization sapping the satisfaction of overcoming tough sections since you can never really know if it will be for naught. An unfortunately classic case of difficult elements not having the room needed to make them work properly, Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure feels at odds with Takahashi’s usual more approachable eccentric output and what Playdate players should be introduced to with their second week’s set of gratis games.