The Princess and the Portals
This is probably about as close as we’ll ever get to a Portal game on the Playdate. It’s effectively a single-screen puzzle game, where each screen is a room that you need to pass with your portal powers. Aim with the crank, A to fire one portal, and B to fire another portal. Enemies, projectiles, and even you — go through one portal and come out the other. It makes sense and uses the portals in some fun ways, and none of the rooms really felt that similar to another, which is an important piece of a solid puzzle game.
There was this original Xbox exclusive game years and years ago called Advent Rising. It was supposed to be part of a new series, and it was supposed to have a million dollar contest that you could win by playing on Xbox LIVE, and it was supposed to make up for all the stuff Orson Scott Card did/said/believed. It didn’t really do any of those things, but what it DID do was a very good job at continually introducing new mechanics and gameplay wrinkles right up to the end of the game. You never knew where it was going, or how long the game would be, or what you’d see next. It’s been largely forgotten by the world, but this game hit me at the perfect time in my life to influence a lot of how I know games can be. The Princess and the Portals has a similar quality: it’s not a long game by any means (you’ll beat the whole thing in about an hour the first time, but then you unlock hard mode), but you’ll be acquiring new abilities every few minutes right up until the end.
The time I spent with the game just flew by, but I was actually a little worried at first when I saw it sold as a precision platformer. I was picturing Celeste, or Super Meat Boy, or something really mean like I Wanna Be the Guy. And there are a few times when you need to shoot a portal through a small hole while jumping, sure. But on the whole, I felt like it was a pretty friendly game, much more focused on thinky puzzles than twitch platforming. There weren’t any pixel-perfect jumps you needed to make, and the forgiving resets mean that even when I lost over 100 lives on my first playthrough, it never really felt malicious. Playing with the mechanics and getting to the other side of the screen was the main goal, and it’s always doable with the set of tools at your disposal. That’s a sign of a good puzzle game, to me.
The story also has some fun twists, and it hints at a sequel. The one thing, though, is that hopefully the dev learned enough by making this game with AI coding/debugging assistance to do the next one without it, because it’s going to be one of the last games on Catalog that has generative AI after Panic’s ban on using it in Catalog-approved games. (Previously approved and scheduled upcoming Catalog releases didn’t have this limitation, but they do now. The last few are still coming out.)
Bottom line: if you like the puzzle mechanics of the Portal games and would like to try that in a 2D, pixelated world, this might be your only chance to do so on the Playdate. It’s a really pleasant afternoon of puzzling, and — while platformer skills will definitely help — I did make it halfway through the game before remembering I could jump. So maybe you don’t even really need platformer skills if you utilize the portal mechanics well. See you on the leaderboards!
(Released June 9, 2026, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)