The Playdate gets its Monument Valley

Diora might be the most ambitious game I’ve played on the Playdate. It’s all about perspective: You turn the handheld’s crank to rotate your viewpoint of the bite-size 3D landscapes, which lets you peek around corners to find solutions to various puzzles. On a device with a 1-bit, black-and-white display, the miniature worlds feel miraculous, like little dioramas you can spin around in your hands. But the most impressive part is the puzzles that will have you twisting your brain as much as the crank.

In Diora you play a “network technician” traveling to various locations across a city, fixing up machinery in the wake of a strange accident. Repairing things is easy; all you have to do is reach the computer at the end of each level. Getting there is the hard part.

Diora starts out relatively simple. You hit switches to open up gates or push platforms to create pathways. What makes these familiar puzzles interesting, though, is how Diora plays with your viewpoint. You have to constantly shift where you’re looking to find the right way forward. This can turn even seemingly simple challenges into real brain-scratchers. Each level also steadily ratchets up the intensity. Most have you exploring multi-level structures where the first few floors introduce a concept before hitting you with something more complex.

It’s reminiscent of Monument Valley or Fez, though Diora is different in a few key ways. For one, the architecture (mostly) isn’t filled with M.C. Escher-inspired impossibilities, but instead buildings and structures rooted in reality. And whereas Monument Valley is an almost serene experience, Diora can get really hard. I found myself stuck on more than one occasion, as many of the solutions involve making decisions in a very precise order. There’s no hint system to help you out, which can be frustrating, but Diora does at least have a checkpoint system that means you won’t be replaying huge chunks of the game after making a mistake.

This game is also a good sign that, a few years after launch, developers are really pushing the edges of what the Playdate is capable of. There aren’t many 3D titles on the handheld, and Diora has a sort of grittiness that both fits the Playdate’s aesthetic and lends the game a surprisingly chill postapocalyptic vibe. Diora even has a built-in level editor so you can create your own puzzles.

Not long ago I wrote that one of the Playdate’s strengths was its steadily growing library of puzzle games. They suit the device perfectly: experiences you can play in short bursts when you’re on the go, but also lose yourself in when you’re traveling or otherwise killing time. Diora is right near the top of the list of games I’d recommend; it’s technically impressive, but more importantly, it’s a puzzler that forces your brain to see things in different ways.