Fulcrum Defender
Fulcrum Defender was made by the creators of FTL and Into the Breach, but it isn’t like those games at all. It was also made by the main developer Jay Ma while she was suffering from Long COVID, which is something that so many people still have to worry about despite the world as a whole seeming to have just moved on. She couldn’t focus or work on too big a project because of the brain fog, so a smaller action game on Playdate was perfect. And this one is made for the crank.
At its core, Fulcrum Defender is a sort of tower defense shmup, like an inverse Tempest, or a Vampire Survivors where you don’t move. You control a turret in the middle of the screen, and enemies come at you from every direction. You rotate, aim, and fire, but not too much or your weapons overheat. Earn enough points by defeating enemies (earn extra points if you maintain a combo) to level up. You collect new subweapons or upgrades for your main gun after each level, but the enemies get more difficult and numerous, as well.
Based on which upgrades you choose in between levels (you get a choice between two random upgrades each level), you can customize your build for how you want to play. The subweapons are activated by pushing left or right on the D-pad and each have their own benefits and drawbacks. They all feel really good to use, though. The wrecking ball is my favorite, even though I recognize it’s not the most useful one. These subweapons recharge a lot slower than your main gun, but the main gun will always be there for you. When it’s not overheated, that is.
You also have shields that will restore when you go long enough without taking a hit. So even if you get bumped into a few times, if you get through it and re-center yourself, you can get back to full health. That’s a big part of the game, centering yourself. Each run starts off very slowly, more of a meditation than a shmup. You have to focus a lot only on your aiming and timing since you won’t have any wacky upgrades yet, and the rest of the world moves to the background. It will cramp your hands a bit eventually if you have big hands like me, but there’s no penalty for pausing the game, catching your breath, and hopping back in there.
The game Fulcrum Defender reminds me of the most, though, is Zoop. Zoop was a puzzle game on basically every system known to man back in the 90’s, where you are a little shape in the middle of the playfield, and different-colored shapes would slowly encroach on your zone. You match colors (or in the case of the Game Boy port, patterns), and you’d change into whatever color you grabbed. This let you build up combos as the game went from slow and relaxing to frenetic and impossible. There were more levels than I could ever see, but the music was this smooth jazz lounge music, and the game kept getting harder so gradually in a way that you didn’t notice until you were already underwater. That’s Fulcrum Defender, to me. A poem on meditation that eventually becomes too much before you realize what’s happening.
The game keeps track of your scores and upgrades as a sort of achievement system. However, there are no online leaderboards, and I think that’s a pretty sizable omission. Games like HEXA and Trackminia have a long post-launch tail because of the online competition, but this does mean you don’t have to worry about the people that have already found some exploits enabling them to play a 90-minute round. A round should be about 10-20 minutes! At 10 you get a “You win!” message, but you can keep going as long as you can, and return as often as you’d like. A great start to Season Two.
(Released May 29, 2025, as part of Season Two.)