Flipper Lifter (Playdate)
When I first saw Flipper Lifter among the first season of gratis Playdate titles, I felt fairly confident in assuming it would be a pinball game. You utilize flippers to hit the ball in a game of pinball and the penguin in the game’s banner even seemed to have a flipper for a beak, but it turns out the part of the title I should have focused in on was the word “Lifter”. Flipper Lifter is not a pinball game at all but instead a game about elevator management, and since your passengers are penguins, that’s where the “flipper” in the name comes from.
Flipper Lifter is a score chaser through and through, the goal being to help deliver as many passengers to their desired floors in a building before time runs out. The timer can be lengthened by dropping off penguins and safely carrying them to their destination is also how you earn points, so while the elevator can only hold so many birds at one time, the player is incentivized to bring on as many passengers as they can manage. Managing them ends up being the difficult part naturally, because while the penguins will wait patiently at the different floors indefinitely, they won’t announce which floor they want to get off on until they’re on board. From there, they are now fussy about getting to their floor on time, and if you aren’t able to reach their destination fairly swiftly, they’ll bring the elevator to a stop at the next floor and waddle off it in a huff, the player forced to watch the disgruntled animal storm off for a bit before the elevator starts back up.
Flipper Lifter introduces its gameplay style through a hotel level that only has the single central elevator shaft to worry about. The building will grow over the course of play, new floors gradually added to make reaching the right destination swiftly more difficult and eventually you will run out of time and lock in your score. By spinning the Playdate’s crank you move your lift up and down, and while this is a game of speed, it is also one that requires a bit of precision. If you do not line up the lift perfectly with the floor, the doors will not open and the penguins will not be able to get on or off. Flipper Lifter does feel like it would be a far more energetic game if it wasn’t so particular about you needing to line up the lift just right, but it is likely the game wants to tie positioning directly to crank movement so even having the slightest bit of game assistance in nudging it into position would potentially divorce it from that element. It doesn’t end up feeling like the right choice though because that stringent design direction that is tolerable in the starting hotel stage does not gel well with the four other levels on offer.
Your score across the levels you have unlocked will go towards acquiring new stages automatically, but while there are four additional levels to earn, there are only two new disruptions to your penguin delivering duties. Two of them introduce the idea of sideways movement, there now being multiple elevator shafts in places like the construction site and penguins waiting not only on different floors, but on different sides. Flipper Lifter does not explain how the sideways movement works, and it is easy to make mistakes when figuring out how it operates. What you need to do is line up your lift perfectly with a floor that contains the pulley system for sideways travel, after which the elevator will move over on its own after a bit. Once again, being slightly off will interfere with your work, and since you already need to line up and wait for it to active, you can lose precious seconds because you were the tiniest movement of the crank off from being lined up. Adding any extra moment where the player is waiting also introduces more potential failure points, since already you need to wait for penguins to get off and on, some stops even having penguins stand a fair distance away from the doors so you need to watch them waddle on board during time you can’t really spare. These levels also hit on a small display issue. Normally you can tell if the elevator needs to head up or down to a rider’s desired floor by exclamation markers above or below you, but with horizontal considerations and the levels they crop up in already having more intricate and dark backgrounds, it can be difficult to even make out the indicators, especially since they get darker the closer they are to your penguin getting upset and forcing a stop.
The other gimmick that attempts to add difficulty to the formula also appears only in two levels, and that is the eagle. The penguin passengers are absolutely terrified of the eagle, so whenever you hear it shriek, you can count on one entire floor to be momentarily inaccessible. The eagle will slowly fly across as penguins huddle for cover, and even if you park your elevator on that floor, no birds will get off until the bird of prey has completely left the screen. Floor denial for pick-up makes some sense, as does the idea that if you’re on the floor the eagle is passing through, it will snatch up and carry off all the penguins in your elevator, but the time it wastes is not proportional to the fact its positioning feels designed to disrupt you without their being much recourse for its appearance. The eagle seemingly prefers to appear at floors where you need to deliver riders and what’s worse, it can even attack the same floor twice in a row, and with your penguin passengers being such slowpokes, you might not even really be able to drop riders off before the eagle comes back for a second swoop. There is nothing you can do about the eagle’s choice in which floors to harass so you just have to hope it isn’t picking a pressing one, but even if it doesn’t, it feels inevitable that the eagle will eventually force a rider to angrily storm off your lift and then things can snowball from there.
Because the added variables are so disruptive, the initial hotel level feels like the one where you’re most likely to achieve success, and it’s balance isn’t thrown off by almost random factors. On the official Playdate podcast, the developers admit many elements like the floors the penguins appear on is almost entirely random, and while the levels with sideways shafts at least have some things in place to make sure you keep getting new ways to travel horizontally as the floors pile up, it still can’t help with the fact that leaving so much up to random choice does not gel with hindrances like the eagle. The basic concept feels like a fine idea for an endless score challenge in the hotel, but iterating upon it only went awry here making it hardly the kind of game you’d keep coming back to in order to achieve new high scores.
THE VERDICT: In its starting Hotel level, Flipper Lifter doesn’t seem so bad. The punishment for being late on delivering a penguin is a little time lost rather than outright failure and things become reasonably untenable once there are so many floors to manage you can’t move your elevator quickly enough to keep earning time extensions. The crank needing to be positioned just right is a touch annoying, but it’s the other four levels that strain things too much as eagles and sideways travel lead to you losing too much time to make considerable progress. Dashes of randomness means time limit drain is hard to fend off outside that first level, Flipper Lifter feeling like it needed some smarter gimmicks to realize its premise well but the ones that were implemented only exacerbate the issues that you barely tolerated in the game’s introductory stage.
And so, I give Flipper Lifter for Playdate…
A BAD rating. Because the hotel is much cleaner conceptually than the game’s other four stages, it might be easy to think that first level is where people interested in playing Flipper Lifter should focus their attention. Even though the insistence the crank be in the exact right spot holds it back a touch, you can still earn a respectable score and improve on it, but it still isn’t able to be as energetic as it could have been because the movement controls are the way they are. If the other levels had built on this base and were appropriately lenient with their timers to account for the new complications though, you could have had a decent score chaser. The eagles even seem like they’re a feature or two off from being fine, something like a bigger break between passes or perhaps allowing you to deliver penguins on an attacked floor with the fear they might not waddle off in time to escape the bird’s beak instead feeling like ways it could have been integrated without being a means of directly blocking success when the game feels like it. Sideways movement should have at least been manually controlled or the one lenient spot in the game, but it does bring into the forefront the game’s problems with its heavy focus on play time. Penguins are slow to get on the elevator even when they’re near it, the game not needing many other ways to slow down the pick up and drop off loop to ensure you would gradually run out of time and eventually lose.
The Playdate’s deliberately limited tech brings to mind the Game & Watch line of handhelds and how score chasers were effectively designed for it, the games allowing you to snap instantly into the right position to perform a task like holding a bridge up for people trying to cross. Flipper Lifter’s elevator management premise could have worked as a Game & Watch title, but it would have benefited considerably from a focus not on the actual movement, but the task being performed. Flipper Lifter already hits hitches when the crank needs to be in the perfect spot consistently, but when it can’t even get there due to the game meddling via careless randomization, you end up with a game that’s hard to want to invest time in. The Hotel’s simplicity offers one area where things nearly come together, but with this game by default coming with sounder score chasers like Whitewater Wipeout and Pick Pack Pup, Flipper Lifter can’t get away with being so picky that it drags down an almost exciting game style.