Andrea Baroni Halfway to dawn It's incredibly bleak for a game you can play from start to finish in about 10 minutes. He meant it as a compliment; It's the best horror experience I've had on Playdate so far.
As someone who tends to gravitate towards all things spooky, one of the things I've been most interested in while exploring what's available for Playdate is seeing how the developers will make horror work for the weird little handheld. Halfway to dawn takes a mixed approach: in the first half, it's a text-based narrative game where you search for resources and prepare for the long night ahead; in the second, it's an all-out fight for your life against an onslaught of supernatural creatures.
Halfway to dawn He wastes no time in creating an atmosphere of desolation and impending doom, beginning with our protagonist's dialogue about feeling “as lifeless as these scattered remnants of humanity” in a city taken over by some nameless terror. During the narrative portion of the game, you must choose between different places to visit (the mall, the pharmacy, the armory, and a house) so that you can hopefully find things like first aid kits, weapons, ammunition, and traps. But it is not known whether each of these trips will be successful.
You may find a box of shotgun shells, but never get a shotgun to use it. You could even hurt yourself while searching through the trash. There's also the option to rest, which will fill up your health bar (while you'll start at full health on Easy mode, Hard will start with two of the six health points already depleted). But an hour will pass after each selection and you have to be aware of the time. The clock starts at 6:00 pm, and once it hits 1:00 am, you'll be forced to go out and defend yourself from monsters until dawn.
At this point the game becomes a top-down shooter and depending on how you've done with resources, it's quite challenging. Monsters will approach you from all sides, some of them harder to defeat than others, and you will only be able to replenish ammo and first aid kits from your finite supply at set breaks that mark the passage of an hour. If you run out before then, you'll have no choice but to try to fight the monsters with a knife, which you can move with the crank. That's about as effective as it gets.
Halfway to dawn It's a very, very short game, but it really made me sweat on some runs. It's fun to keep coming back to it, as the randomness in resource collection makes the experience different every time. And the tension of it all is perfectly rounded out by a synth-heavy soundtrack (available on band camp), which could be straight out of an 80's B horror movie. If creepy is your thing, this is definitely a game you should try. Halfway to dawn It's in Play Date Catalog and itch.io for $5.
