Outside Parties
Describing Outside Parties as “a spooky I Spy book” is like describing the Professor Layton games as “just puzzle books.” Like… kind of… sure, I guess… but it’d be doing both games a disservice, since they’re so much more. I first heard of Outside Parties when it won Best Playdate Game Trailer at the Playdate Community Awards… in 2023. Years later, it finally hit the market, and it will make you see things you didn’t think you saw, and hide things you didn’t know were there. A good set of headphones completes the vibe – if this is just a big hidden picture puzzle game, it’s the most engrossing one I’ve ever seen.
The game presents you with a huge, 360-degree wraparound, 1.44-gigapixel spooky HDR image of “a realm beyond our own.” Audio logs tell you the thing you need to find next, and why. They’re fully voiced and subtitled (over 150 of them!), and even coming out of the Playdate’s tiny speaker, it sounds great. You use the crank to change the brightness level of the image, so a spot that looks completely black at first can actually be hiding a clue, or a big spider, or a creepy man. I saw it described as “searching in 3D” since each part of the picture has a depth to it that can only be clarified by brightening/darkening the view with the crank. There are also tons of visual and audio glitches (intentional) that add to the unsettling world.
The image never changes (I don’t think?), but it’s got such a density to it that you’ll feel like it surely must’ve altered itself from one 360-degree pan to the next. (It loops to the left and right but there is a set top and bottom to the huge image.) You’ll see new things in places that you’re SURE you checked thoroughly before, and as you learn to remember certain parts of the image, you’ll use that knowledge to help you find things faster later in the story.
Sometimes you’ll find the next thing you’re looking for in just a few seconds, or sometimes you’ll be stuck for many minutes. Each person that’s played it has gotten stuck on something different (for me, the sheep took quite a while), but persistence will pay off. The full game should take 10-20 hours, which is a chunky amount of time for a platform that can often be seen as no more than quick hits. And there’s no time limit for each search, but some of the spooky noises in your headphones will start to make you feel like you’re going a little crazy, like in Senua’s Saga or how I imagine it feels sometimes when you’re plugged into a huge satellite array, searching for extraterrestrial life in the depths of space with nothing but your ears.
Locating something is as simple as centering it on the screen, then a new audio log will point you to the next thing you need to find. The story and whole concept behind using the Playdate as a sort of extra-dimensional sensor device is really interesting and deserves to be experienced if you’re curious at all in a spooky, engrossing hide-and-seek game. One thing that was a little odd, though, is that at the beginning of the game it makes you use the Playdate’s gyroscope to sort of calibrate it, but then the actual picture-searching is just done with the d-pad to scroll and the A/B buttons to zoom, with the crank adjusting the light levels. I’m curious if a gyro-led version would even be possible on the hardware, like scanning for clues with the Wii U GamePad in LEGO City Undercover. Just seems a little strange to use the gyro for one minor part in the intro and then not in the main game?
Despite that, Outside Parties is exactly as described: a spooky scavenger hunt on a giant creepy image that will take hours to completely explore. But the sounds, the story, the never knowing what you’ll see next… these elements elevate it to an essential Playdate experience. I don’t know if it would be described as “fun,” but it is interesting in a way that most games would never dare to attempt, and it thoroughly succeeds in what it’s trying to be and do.
(Released November 18, 2025, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer. You can read a fun little devlog from years before it was finished here.)