Up until now, Subset Games has made two games, and they’re both kind of ideal. Perfection has no place in art, but these things are really special. FTL is a terrifying and hilarious game about steering a ship across the galaxy in short hops, managing various stats, accidentally venting your comrades into space, and dealing with robot invaders who can literally shoot their way into your hull. Into the Breach is a game of tactics and positioning as you take three units into compact turn-based battles that clearer heads than mine have pointed out wouldn’t be out of place on the games page of a newspaper.
So when I heard Subset had a new game coming out I thought: clarity and chaos will both be at the heart of it, but beyond that? No idea. I have no idea what Subset’s ultimately capable of at this point. Then when I heard that Subset’s new game was a platform exclusive, and that the platform in question is the Playdate? Mercy, as Roy Orbison so memorably said.
Anyhoo, Subset’s new game is called Fulcrum Defender, and it’s available as part of Playdate’s second season, in which new games appear on your machine every week or so and anticipation is a huge part of the fun. Subset gets the opening act, which makes sense as pretty much everyone who’s played FTL and Into the Breach has nothing but good memories. But on the surface, Fulcrum Defender is a very different design. It’s an arcade game, and it’s as twitchy as they come.
The Playdate is the console with the crank, and Subset’s decided to go all-in on that concept. Fulcrum Defender is kind of like a spin on Asteroids or an inversion of Tempest. You’re at the centre of the screen and enemies come from all around you, moving through 2D space as they zero in on your position. The gimmick is that you aim your weapons by turning the crank, and then you fire either by pressing up on the d-pad for a single shot, or down for everything in the clip.
Already Subset’s particular interests are visible. Your clips are very shallow at first and they take a long time to recharge, so you’re constantly managing your aggressive tendencies against your resources. You have shields, which come with a meter that’s a classic piece of utilitarian Subset UI, and so you have a limited ability to let enemies slip through your defences and impact you.
At first, though, it’s a wonderfully weird game to play as an arcade experience, because it’s just so slow. For the first minute or so, enemies move slowly and so do your bullets. I got used to kind of winging a bullet at a distant enemy and then moving on to wing another bullet at another distant memory. What did this feel like? It actually felt a bit like playing Paperboy. You line up your shots like you line up those tightly folded newspapers, and then you have to have faith that they hit their targets, because by that point you’ll be busy with something else.
Crucially, though, Fulcrum Defender gets faster quite quickly. You shoot enemies to level up and unlock a choice of weapons or upgrades, and in the early stages you’re often thrown choices that allow you a bigger clip, a faster reload or bullet speed, or a combination of those things. Enemies grow in complexity, moving outwards from the empty squares that head straight for you and take a single shot, to filled-in squares that require multiple hits or circles, which seem to orbit you, getting closer, and therefore providing an entirely different kind of target.
This is just the start, of both upgrades and enemies, and the game manages to expand outwards in its ideas without ever losing its internal harmonies. Once you know that a filled-in enemy requires more shots to kill, you’ll often find that you understand new enemies even if you haven’t seen them before. Changes to size and speed are pretty easy to grasp, and you’ll quickly learn that even bullets that don’t kill a foe outright will knock it back, giving you a bit of room to think.
Then there’s the weapons. Shotguns, that take out a wider angle of foes. Shotgun-thingies that leave little mines behind them. A flail or a mini-turret, both of which are operated by the crank. Taken alongside the need to manage the cooldown on your main gun, and there’s plenty of stuff to consider.
It’s fascinating to see Subset working with a different kind of focus and restriction to a game design. A lot of the time, it feels like the team’s seeing how much variation you can cope with when it comes to a very simple idea, and that scales pretty well, whether you’re the kind of player who likes to pick a thoughtful and idealised path through upgrades or clip together the wildest collection of upgrades and weapons just to see if they’ll work. There’s control, and there’s chaos – the twin Time Lord hearts of Subset’s approach to design.
And best of all, there’s the sparseness and clarity that lets the really extreme unlocks and enemies do their thing. The whole thing, this whole galactic battle, looks like it could play out on the screen of a scientific calculator. The crank is responsive and quickly becomes second nature, and the expanding circle that shows you how close you are to your next level-up gives the whole thing a lovely newsprint vibe. There’s so much pleasure here even before you get into deeper strategies and combo-nursing.
One last thing: each game is ten minutes long – unless you die first. Make it to ten minutes and you’re done. This provides the waves you face with a luminous kind of cumulative force, and it also gives each run a sense of familiarity as the two-minute marker goes past, say, and then the five-minute marker goes past. If you’ve ever got into running – particularly if you’ve used the Couch to 5K app to do so – you’ll recognise this kind of internal orientation that a time limit allows for. Hopefully in an update they can add the half-way bell and encouraging chatter from Sanjeev Kohli.
Oh, one other thing about the ten-minute limit. On my third game of Fulcrum Defender, I died with the clock at 9.59. If that doesn’t tell you this is a Subset joint, I don’t know what will.
A copy of Fulcrum Defender was provided for review by Playdate.
