Read Watch Listen Play

There are very few things on this site that I don’t wholeheartedly recommend. With almost 2,000 Playdate games now available, and me being just one person with a limited amount of time to cover as many of them as I can, I try to focus on the good ones, the ones that catch my eye, and the ones that do interesting things. Read Watch Listen Play… I can’t completely recommend it. But the IDEAS on display here. They haunt me. They’re so good. I want to love it and open it up every day until I die. But I probably won’t.

I’ve been trying to do whatever I can to cut down on my social media doomscrolling. There are just so many things happening every day, all the time, and me knowing about the latest deaths or the algae growing in the pond isn’t really helping me live a full, happy life. I’ve tried downloading new mobile games, reading more on my Kindle and manga apps, and getting into the electronic versions of the Fighting Fantasy books and other text adventures. I always have my phone on me, no matter what, so the only way I’ll get away from the evil social phone apps is with another, hopefully less evil, other phone app.

And here comes Read Watch Listen Play, a Playdate… not really a game. I guess an “app” is the best descriptor for it? Each day, the idea is that it gives you four new “gifts”: something to read, something to watch, something to listen to, and something to play (a mini crossword puzzle). At the end of the day, they disappear and a new set of four things takes its place via Wi-Fi. They’re all public domain works, free to watch and distribute, and the point isn’t to feel bad if you don’t finish one or the other before the end of the day — they’re gifts, just for you. It’s like a game backlog: don’t feel bad that you have so many games you haven’t even tried yet, but instead feel thankful that you have this giant library you can dip into at any time. Maybe one day your wife will ask if you have a certain old game that she heard about, and you can just pull it off the shelf. It’s a gift.

I love this idea, so much. But there are little (or big) issues with every one of the four gifts that just eats at me. I’m going to delve into each, one at a time.

Read — This one had the most potential for me, because I personally don’t read as much as I’d like to, and this seems like a great excuse. A new short story every day? Yes please. After about a week of these, though, a couple things kept popping up. First, it lists out the expected reading time, which is great. But sometimes that’s an entire 60 minutes, which is… too much to ask. I think there shouldn’t be a story on here that asks for more than 20 minutes of your day, or it’s no longer a gift — it’s an ask. It’s a burden. And if you don’t finish the story on time, you’ll never know how it ends, and you’re going to have to look it up on the internet, where you can read it on, I don’t know, some webpage of public domain works. That feels worse than never starting it at all.

And as for the story selection: there is the occasional literary classic like “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville or Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” but there’s also some stuff from famous racist H.P. Lovecraft, or some pretty graphic old fantasy stories, and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which, as you may recall from an episode of Sealab 2021, is about eating babies. Still an important work, sure, but it’s not really getting me away from reading things I shouldn’t be reading. It’s like when you go to one of those “surprise” movies at the theater and it ends up being a slasher flick when you hoped it’d be a romantic comedy.

Last thing: the font was changed to something more readable for ebooks on the Playdate screen (after initially launching with a more developer-centric font), but italics still look off and make the spacing awkward, and the scrolling with the crank is choppy. Which is weird, because scrolling through the “About” page in the menu is smooth. You can use the d-pad, too, but it’s got the same choppiness that makes reading more uncomfortable than it should be. A different selection of shorter stories and some smoothing out of the scrolling, and this could be terrific. As it is, I don’t know how often I’ll keep returning to receive my daily gift.

Watch — The old-timey selections here, compared to the written stories, feel like they’re from a different timeline. Much of the old TV that’s public domain now is educational programs from something that feels like the Fallout universe but earnest, which makes it both worse and better (complimentary). There are nature documentaries and shorts about keeping kids healthy, all hand-dithered to look good on the Playdate screen. It’s like if Blippo+ content was played straight, and would benefit hugely from the most-likely-cancelled Playdate Stereo Dock (r.i.p.). The audio sounds good, though, even through the tiny speaker.

The length of the shows here is much more gift-sized, usually around 10 minutes each, sometimes up to 30. It streams over your internet connection fairly well, but if you want to fast-forward or rewind, you’ll need to download it first, which takes a not-short amount of time, and the “Listen” gift always downloads first (presumably because it’s smaller and faster to do so). It will save your spot in the show if you close the app and come back, but it feels like that only works after it’s been fully downloaded, too, just like the crank-based forward/back controls. The weirdest part was that the playback seemed choppier after downloading than when streaming, which seems… counter-intuitive. Either way, your best bet is to open the app and let both the audio and video download for ten minutes or so while you do something else, before delving into either.

And despite the sci-fi/fantasy short story “Read” selections being too graphic for my tastes, old-time television sci-fi is exactly what I’d like to see more of here. Homemade costumes and hammy acting would be perfect, and a bunch of it was already in black-and-white, too. Honestly, an entire app of only old sci-fi movies and shows like they play at a drive-in theater would be very appealing to me, personally, without any of the ads and algorithms that YouTube tries to shove in when you try to watch things there.

I enjoy the nature documentaries here, but there’s only a certain amount of “how to keep kids healthy in the 50’s” shorts I can watch before being like, “How did any of us survive this long?”

Listen — This is the strongest part of the app, to me. Radio shows used to be THE form of entertainment before TV came along and did all the things it did, and the audio sounds great on the tiny speaker. I like to turn this on and lay in the dark for a little while with the kitties, and imagine the lives that people had when they heard this for the first time. For most people, it was worse in almost every single way. And for some, this was the only popular entertainment they’d get besides rolling a metal hoop down a dirt road with a stick. I’m glad we have video games now.

The funniest part about listening to these radio comedy shows in the future is just how painfully unfunny they are. Hearing the crowd laugh when they’re supposed to (or maybe that was a laugh track most of the time?) is amazing, because… woof. That wasn’t a joke, why are you laughing? Where’s the punchline? But people were so starved for an escape from their lives of the worst hot dog casserole you’ve ever seen, that this was the peak of entertainment. Today it can be enjoyed as a quaint window into the past, and each day’s offering has something new. The mystery and sci-fi radio dramas, with their actual production values and practical sound effects, are my favorites.

Play — This is the most disappointing part, because the controls are basically non-operational. You move around the crossword grid with the d-pad and scroll through the letters in each box with the crank; seems doable! But no matter what speed you crank the crank, the next letter to appear is a mystery. Goes from A, to blank, to B, to Y, to J. It’s not based on the angle of the crank from what I could determine, either, so straight up could be A, then straight down be M. It was just… frustrating. You can also click the A button to go through the letters one at a time, but you can’t click it too quickly to get to the later letters of the alphabet or it doesn’t register, and I don’t want to fill out a whole crossword by going through one letter at a time by pushing the A button slowly and repeatedly. And if you blast past your letter? Well, time to go all the way around again. I should be able to know what word I need to enter from the clue and crank to E, move to the next open square, crank to Y, move, crank to E, and it should be that quick. As is, it’s borderline unplayable, which is too bad, because completing an entire crossword puzzle (even a tiny one) can feel so rewarding when you see all the squares filled out.

In the end, I just cannot get over how good of an idea this whole app is. I would love to love it and open it every day, like a window into the past where you never know what you’re going to see today. And it’s pay-what-you-want on Itch! But some of the selections and the functionality just aren’t there, and there are only so many days I can get burned in a row before I just clear its space from my limited Playdate hard drive.

Asks: smoother ebook scrolling with a greater focus on classic literature short stories (the kind you’d get assigned in school), more entertainment vs. educational video content, and crossword crank controls that actually work. Radio part? You’re doing great, honey! I’d love a faster download, too, but that just ain’t happening on the Playdate, and that’s kind of part of its charm, like how you can’t play it in the dark without wearing a headlamp.

And I know it’s a free app that probably took a lot of work, and maybe some or all of these problems are the result of the AI used in the coding and graphics and story selections. But the idea of the whole thing is so compelling, that it just makes me yearn for it being done… a little better. Maybe someday it will be.

(Released June 4, 2026, pay-what-you-want on Itch.)