XORBIUS

XORBIUS is a clean game. It’s a twin-stick shooter with only one kind of enemy (space squares with rounded corners), one regular attack (a nonstop flurry of single shots from your ship in whatever direction the crank is pointing), one special attack (a powerful straight laser power-up that drops occasionally and needs to be shot to activate for a few seconds), and one goal: live as long as possible. It would fit in an 80s arcade right next to Tempest and Discs of Tron and the like. But instead it’s here, on the Playdate in 2026, where the crank gives a whole new level of tactility to the aiming.

Every enemy you kill with your auto-shooting laser gives you one point, and there are local, daily, and all-time leaderboards (on the Catalog version only – leaderboards are not supported on Itch). I found that the worldwide competition really adds a lot to the game, and the developer must, too, because there is a “Lite” version on Itch that is free to play and is basically the whole game without leaderboards. This is a fun experiment! Playdate games don’t traditionally do all that well on Itch, especially compared to the on-every-device-and-also-the-internet Catalog, so it’ll be neat to see how well what is basically a free shareware version will do to convert trials into full sales. It’s an enormous goodwill gesture, and I hope it makes at least a few people plop five bucks down on the full game.

The game itself has a nice smooth progression. Every run starts off slowly, with just a few enemies coming from all four sides of the screen and you dodging around in your minimalist circular ship, constantly firing in any direction you’re aiming. The speed of the ship and the bullets feels spot-on to what I’d expect, and after you get about 50 points, your shots start going faster. But it won’t be enough. By 100 points or so, you’ll start getting many more enemies on screen at any given moment, and then the double-sized squares that break into smaller enemies start to appear. Later, even bigger squares start attacking. They vary in speed, but none of them track you or anything – they all just start on one edge of the screen and move towards the other.

Your gun never levels up, but a super laser that lasts for just a few moments will drop every so often, and it can clear the screen if you spin fast enough, giving you a few seconds of respite. A round will last just a few minutes tops, and then you’ll get your final score which can be submitted to the leaderboards. I like that the score only appears every 25 points, phasing in then disappearing quickly, so you never really know your EXACT score. But you’ll keep seeing it rise each time you hit a milestone, and it keeps the screen clean of anything nonessential for the most part. Just a little design choice that I appreciate.

Honestly, there aren’t really any design choices about this game I didn’t appreciate. It’s one of the most uncluttered, pure, old-school games on the system, and it really gets exactly what enabled those old arcade games to suck up so many quarters. Be careful or XORBIOUS could abXORB all your free time.

(Released February 10, 2026, on Catalog and Itch. Lite version free-to-try. Copy provided by developer.)