Chance’s Lucky Escape

Unlike bleak Season Two standout The Whiteout, Chance’s Lucky Escape is a point-and-click adventure that’s playful. It uses the Playdate’s microphone and crank and accelerometer in silly ways. It’s got some very European absurdist humor. And it stars a dog that alternates between being the luckiest and unluckiest creature you’ll ever meet, getting into so many hijinks, only some of which are his fault.

It’s a spinoff/side story to the Inspector Waffles games from Goloso Games, which you can find on many platforms including the original Game Boy. This one was made in conjunction with EGA pixel art whiz Julia Minamata (of The Crimson Diamond fame), and luckily you don’t need to have played the other games to get what’s going on in this one. I didn’t, and I was able to follow along, but it’s also clearly going to be more impactful for people that are already fans of Goloso’s other works. There are occasionally characters that just appear for a scene or two that are obviously little winks for longtime fans of the series.

It’s a very short game - about an hour long at most, with six bite-sized chapters - and that really works for me. You never carry too many items at once, so even if you do the classic adventure game “use every item on every interactable spot on the screen” trope, it only takes moments to go through your entire inventory. The cursor moves around the screen at a good clip, and little text pop-ups as you move your arrow over objects make it clear what parts of the environment can be interacted with. It’s not hard, and I never got stuck - it feels almost like a spiritual successor to the Putt-Putt games.

There’s no dying in this game, and there are no soft locks because you didn’t grab an item at the beginning of the game that you needed three hours later. It’s the point-and-click adventure genre distilled to its simplest, purest form, with no fluff or cruelty. It’s a game that’s in on the joke with you, instead of laughing at you. Whereas The Whiteout gives you a dead body in the first scene, this one has you blowing out birthday candles with the Playdate’s microphone. Each style has its place, but one is clearly more pleasant! And each short chapter is a little fun sized candy bar treat on a warm summer’s day. Playdate is a console of whimsy, and few games embody that ideology more than Chance’s Lucky Escape.

(Released June 26, 2025, as part of Season Two.)