Pick Pack Pup (Playdate)

Pick Pack Pup is a match-3 puzzler, but many of the standard rules of that genre aren’t in place. You are still encouraged to match three identical items, but you don’t just have to make that match horizontally or vertically. You can make a right angle match, an S shape, or large U bend, but even after the match is made, the items don’t leave the board quite yet. Instead, the matched objects are put in a box, the player encouraged to box up as many of the items on the board as they can before turning them in for large valuable combos.

 

While this approach to a matching game feels like it has room for some incredible strange shapes and high value combos, there’s not as much space for complication as you might hope. The moment three objects that are alike are chained together, they will be locked into a parcel. This means by design, you can’t really make too many enormous matches. A T-shaped match made of 7 objects is the high end of your abilities since the minimum for a match will otherwise sabotage efforts to get too extravagant, but the extra dimensions allowed in a match can lead to some more thoughtful item arrangements than just trying to make straight lines. This is especially pertinent because of the combo system. Pieces on the board can be moved vertically and horizontally but they cannot be moved past a wrapped up parcel, meaning you’ll want to arrange your matches so that objects aren’t blocked off from each other.

Despite using the Playdate’s monochrome display, Pick Pack Pup is able to make objects easy enough to distinguish from each other for snappy matching, and all its game mechanics tie into the game’s story rather well. Those items you are boxing up and shipping out are deliveries being made by the Fetch corporation, a rather transparent pastiche of Amazon right down to the way its warehouse workers are overworked and poorly treated. All the characters are talking dogs though and its clear the down on their luck pup you play as keens onto the poor warehouse situation early on, and generally it’s more absurd parody than biting social commentary. When you play a level in the game’s story you’ll get a letter from your boss telling you the requirements for completion in the next level and their money-grubbing ways are transparently ridiculous, everything presented with a cute cartoon look as well despite a lack of color.

 

The items you’ll be matching in Pick Pack Pup change with each level or across modes, items like fruits, gadgets, and balls all helping in differentiating levels so they stand out but the game does have different goals based on the stage you’re at in the story. Most of the time the main concern will be hitting a cash quota, deliveries worth more if they’re larger in size both when it comes to the package shape and how many are shipping out at once when you turn them in. A few levels add a timer to this task but it’s usually pretty easy to just blitz your matching work and clear the timed levels, but there are ideas that shift up how you approach levels too. Some might only allow you to make a certain amount of shipments so you have to get the big matches, others will only give you credit for certain items matched, but even some of the more exciting ones end up not shifting up the play too much. A cameo from the goose from Untitled Goose Game leads to it sometimes stealing pieces from the board, but at the same time, that’s not particularly disruptive or damaging since it is just one slowly purloined item. A level where the pieces are Tetris blocks too quickly ends because the challenge for it is so easy to complete.

 

Difficulty is Pick Pack Pup’s biggest barrier to being an enjoyable match-3 puzzler you’re likely to return to. The story cooks up some challenges so you’re not just blindly matching until you clear a level, but the challenges are rarely demanding and the game lacks the kind of strong pressure that could lead to rising tensions. Its main danger ends up being a mechanic where eventually, every twenty seconds the bottom row of items in the 5×6 grid will be trashed and you’ll receive a small cash penalty. If a box has even one part in that row it will be lost and you can use some creative box shapes to block pieces from falling down to lower rows, but the play area is pretty small and the better option is usually just to ship out the matches you’ve made right before the timer runs out. It is technically a pressure but one that rarely can lead to outright failure and it’s a bit too easy to manage.

This is why the game’s other modes outside the story don’t end up the kind of replayable idle activities you’d hope for out of a match-3 puzzler. Infinity Mode never ends until you decide it will, but those disappearing items at the bottom do get more costly over time so you’ll likely quit once they start impacting your high score too much. It’s not the kind of active pressure like struggling to stay alive that would make continued play compelling, more a build-up to if you feel defeated enough to admit this run will no longer earn a high score. Chill Mode has no failure state either, instead the focus is just about trying to match as many objects on screen as you can and trying to outperform previous large matches with the average across ten shipments being your “score”. Time Attack sadly only has a 2 minute clock so it ends too soon and Danger Zone throws in some bombs you need to keep from being thrown out by that twenty second timer, Danger Zone perhaps the closest to really introducing a strong motivation to keep matching well. The play isn’t made bad because the game doesn’t really whip up a way to make it exciting or tense, but the modes outside of a 30 stage story struggle to provide motivation to stick with them.

 

The Playdate’s crank has little impact on Pick Pack Pup’s play, and in fact, none of the item matching involves it. Mostly its purpose is to scroll through the game’s story comics and activate a few easter eggs, the game’s secret mode actually probably the best when it comes to longevity since it asks you to make the most profitable order out of ten shipments in total. It’s a bit like Chill Mode but with a greater focus on good matches since it’s a lot more committal, but it still feels a rather small way of testing your abilities.

THE VERDICT: Pick Pack Pup being a more relaxed match-3 puzzler is possibly intentional but it ends up missing out on the potential of its parcel building system. The story provides a cute and funny framing with the challenges present to mix things up enough that it’s a fun if short ride, but replayability struggles since the extra modes are afraid to apply too much pressure or really threaten the player with a loss if they can’t keep up. Placing items right to make the biggest shipments possible is fine entertainment for a while, but the novelty of little gimmicks that don’t complicate things enough means Pick Pack Pup feels like its missing the difficulty increase where it could go from simple fun to thrilling efforts to balance your workload.

 

And so, I give Pick Pack Pup for Playdate…

An OKAY rating. Wiping away the bottom pieces of the board in a way that won’t often lead to failure is the best Pick Pack Pup really whips up when it comes to danger, and since the game locked itself into a match-3 format, it can’t quite lean into more cerebral challenges since your packages will always be limited in size somewhat. A board with 30 clearly distinguishable items on the Playdate screen does show a smart approach to designing a game with no colors besides shades of black and grey, but it also feels like the box-building action could be more intricate with more room to breathe and then you could make the kind of deeper considerations required to make modes with little danger more compelling. There’s always going to be a touch of challenge in arranging items to safely get around each other and make the biggest matches you can and some Story Mode situations and requirements push it a little more towards that thoughtful sort of play, but it feels like Pick Pack Pup never took the next step up in difficulty that would make it addictive or energetic. If it wanted to be slow-paced it should be more complicated, if it wanted to be more lively it needed something more threatening than the bottom row being cleared out to little effect, but Pick Pack Pup can still be charming with its adorable characters, silly with its parody of warehouse work, and sometimes inventive with a new twist to the goals of a level even if it’s not reaching for the stars when it comes to how hard completing the new task will be.

 

While the fear of loss is where block dropping puzzlers derive their game flow and energy, the parcel building could have been a more meditative and careful system where you try to box up everything you can without impeding your work elsewhere on the board. The idea wasn’t pursued to the point it really makes that the core appeal though, the game instead a selection of nifty but not fully fleshed out twists to the match-3 formula. Transferring the mechanics to a game on a larger grid with more room to play with the concept would likely help Pick Pack Pup stand out more and stick with the player longer, but the twist to making your matches still makes a quick playthrough of the story entertaining enough that you won’t resent it being one of the included titles in Playdate’s first season of provided titles.