What the Crow?!
What the Crow?! has mastered the scope of what is possible and achievable in a game jam. This one was a month long, so developer Lumi had time to make a fully voiced intro cutscene using the amazing Panels app and polish the small play area to perfection.
You play as crow that woke up with a BANG. Someone destroyed your house? Humans! It’s time to get your revenge. So you fly into the nearest human house and wreck everything without getting caught. There’s one antagonist, a human walking slowly back and forth through the first-floor of her house, drinking coffee. And as long as you stay out of her line of sight, you can smash everything in her house, earning combos for faster smashing. This jam demo just has the one floor (a kitchen, dining room, and a living room), and the human can’t hear and doesn’t turn around much, so as long as you stay behind her and hide behind something when she walks by, you can go completely nut nut in her house.
It's a side-scroller with some verticality. The A button flaps your wings with an almost Flappy Bird feeling of gravity and weight to your crow, and B is for slapping household goods with your wings. Almost everything in the environment is destructible, even the TV and light bulbs. The lights are the trickiest part, requiring both flapping and slapping together. If the human sees you, she throws a homing cardboard box at you that there is no way to escape (although the developer is adding the ability to outrun the box in a future update, perhaps in the full Catalog release). But there’s a high score that you can keep reaching for by combo-ing smashes together, and it saves the score so you can come back later.
The whole game only takes a few minutes, and the “win state” is just… everything is broken, so it’s time to get caught. You can try again and again to beat my high score (just over 100,000), or you can just hope that Lumi adds more features and rooms and gets this game on Catalog someday. The base is solid, the characters have personality, and the physics feel good. And every time I hear an actual voice on the Playdate, I’m reminded of just how capable this little yellow box is. Great stuff!