Mission LunaTrix

Mission LunaTrix, from prolific Playdate dev rae, started as a game jam game, as many of them do. What many of them do NOT do, though, is win PlayJam 7 like this game did. It’s a short-burst, online leaderboard-enabled, high score chaser about doing skateboard tricks on the Moon.

The fun part about doing sick tricks on the Moon is the use of the crank. You accelerate automatically, and the crank turns your board. Pick up O2 tanks to refill your ever-depleting air and keep your run going while looking for craters to trick off of. Once you’re in the air (for much longer than you could be on Earth, thanks to the one-sixth gravity), perform tricks using a combination of spinning with the crank and pushing different directions on the d-pad. Make sure you stop before you come back to the ground to stick the landing and keep your combo going. Pick up UFOs or flags left on the planet’s surface for extra points, but make sure to avoid the rovers, which will knock you over and end your combo.

After you collect a certain amount of points, your astronaut character will start flashing. This means that the next crater-ramp you hit will blast you free of the planet’s gravity. Of course, this just means that you’ll land on another moon with more difficult obstacles and a higher score requirement before blasting off again. Your oxygen refills between levels and will drain constantly. See how far you can go!

There are daily and overall leaderboards, which - as of this writing - I am at the top of. My years of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater practice have paid off! My favorite part is how the whole planet seems to rotate when you turn the crank. The controls feel really good (even when you’re not 100% sure which button combinations do what tricks), and that iconic rae art style and personality flows through every aspect of the game, from the title screen on. For example, each time you catch some air, there’s a split screen with one half of the screen showing a zoomed-in view of your astronaut feet and how they’re flipping the board around in space, so you can really see how radical you are on this lonely satellite. If a kickflip is landed and no one can see, did it really happen? Yes. You can be rad even if no one is watching. In fact, I highly recommend it.

(Game jam version released March 10, 2025, on Itch. Full game released June 24, 2025, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)