Eye to Eye

I couldn’t get past more than a few screens in Serrotonin’s last game, LOVE and HATE (too hard for me!), but this one is more in my genre of expertise: the precision platformer. Eye to Eye is a single-screen (for the most part) platformer made completely in Pulp, Panic’s free, web-based game engine. Pulp was not meant for platform games, and you shouldn’t try to make a platform game in Pulp. The fact that this one is so smooth and great does not make any sense, and between this and Off-Planet Dreams, it feels like, “Actually, maybe people SHOULD make platformers in Pulp!” But at the same time, the bar is pretty high now, so good luck with that.

In Eye to Eye, you play as the eye of the Cyclops from Greek mythology. You can do a short jump with A and then shed some tears to descend slowly with each subsequent button tap, or charge up for a moment then do a screen-high jump with B. And that’s it! It’s very old-school NES/Game Boy in that there aren’t power-ups — you just get to learn to get better with the limited moveset you have.

There are four different worlds that can be visited in any order, and each has their own set of challenges. One is more combat-heavy, one has dissolving platforms, etc. Each world consists of ten levels, and you’ll need to beat all ten to break the chains holding down… something, that’s a secret. Each individual level is a single screen and reminds me a bit of Joust? But also Super Meat Boy? You have to defeat all the enemies with your tears or high jumps, or you have to collect all the sparkles that appear. Once you do, you return to the Cyclops’s empty eye hole and advance to the next level.

There were a few “Oh, this really was made in Pulp, huh” quirks, like feeling like you made a jump over an enemy but didn’t quite, but once you get used to the specific feel of the game, it will all kind of lock into place in your mind. Luckily, the fee for dying is small — re-doing a level from the beginning usually means you lost no more than 60 seconds. The interesting part is that some of the levels felt a bit like a puzzle game, where you first need to figure out where to jump and in what order to best utilize the dissolving platforms to collect all the sparks, and leave yourself a way out, too. It’s not just jumping; it’ll take some planning and repetition, too.

I got stuck early on on a difficult level (Mirage 10), so I recommend trying the other worlds first. By the time I got back there later, the mechanics were second nature to me and I realized exactly what it was asking of me. Ever heard the story about the design of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1, with the blocks that bounce you onto the first enemy, showing you how you’ll need to play? This game does some of that, too, and teaches you without a word. Somehow, this Pulp-built wonder is one of the best platformers on the Playdate. It’s smart, the controls are tight, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Also a special shout-out to Playdate’s de facto music man James Gameboy for providing the soundtrack. One of the best to ever do it.

It took me 133 lives to beat Eye to Eye the first time — how about you?

(Released June 23, 2026, on Catalog and Itch. Itch also has a demo! Copy provided by developer.)