Echo Drop!
If there is one game on the Playdate that I could see getting turned into a full-sized arcade machine at your local Round1, it’s Echo Drop! (Do not forget the exclamation point; it’s an important part of the game name.) It is a story-based rhythm game with licensed, pumping EDM/house music and very natural and intuitive crank controls, and it has both the sound and vibe to fit right in with all the other Japanese music games yelling at you from the neon-lit arcade.
You play as two young DJs trying to make it big, and in true video game fashion, that means you get to push buttons in time with music. You move your cursor with the crank around a ring at the center of the playfield as notes come flying in from the left and right sides, and your job is to turn the crank to the right note then push any of the Playdate’s face buttons at the appropriate, on-beat time. The d-pad seems like the obvious choice for a button to push while cranking, but the B button also feels correct since it’s a real BUTTON button. Any button that feels good, though, is fine.
There are multiple difficulty levels and no fail states, and there are other ways to make the game trickier on yourself, too, like making notes disappear just before they hit your ring, forcing you to match the timing without a visual cue. There’s also a note randomizer, or you can mirror the note patterns. I’m not sure what effect these modifications have on the score, but there is an overall leaderboard for each level, as well as a daily leaderboard which is almost always a song at the hardest difficulty.
The licensed music is not from big, popular bands (one has only seven monthly listeners on Spotify), but you might find a new band to love. I know it’s easy to make fun of Moby (leave Natalie Portman ALONE), but he licensed his music to the extreme, getting it in car commercials and TV shows all over the place, just to get it out there. If I was an up-and-coming electronic artist and I heard that there was a Playdate game looking for house music, I would absolutely try to be part of it. I’m not sure how the process went between the game developer and the musician getting together, but it brought music you wouldn’t normally hear to your ears, and in a fun, interactive way. I think that’s cool.
The lack of fail states means that even if you stumble over a hard part, you’ll still be able to hear the whole song, see the whole game, and get a score submitted to the leaderboard. It won’t be that high on the leaderboard unless you’re playing on the hardest difficulty, but it’ll still give you something to shoot for!
The closest game I can come up with that’s like Echo Drop! is MaiMai DX, so if you’ve ever played that one at Round1 or Akihabara (either the electronic district in Tokyo or my favorite Japanese arcade just northwest of Denver, Colorado), you’ll have a fun time here. The art is earnest and clearly human-made. The music is catchy. The 1:1 crank controls feel great. And the difficulty curve is smooth. It’s all good!
One little trick it’s got, though, is that the ring at the middle is, well… it’s a circle, so notes flying in from the left and right on the top or bottom rows will intersect the circle at a different beat than the middle notes since they’re farther in. So if it looks like every note coming in will hit at the same moment, it will not! The center will go first! It’s a fun little quirk that takes some getting used to as you get into the higher/faster difficulty levels, and it keeps the gameplay from ever getting stale even though it’s only note-matching, with no holding or sliding or anything like that to mix things up. Sometimes simple is better, and it’s not a hugely long game, so nailing the basics is more important. Make the core game feel good and you’ve got a winner.
(Released November 25, 2025, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)