Andrea Baronis Halfway to dawn is incredibly dark for a game that can be played from start to finish in about 10 minutes. I mean that as a compliment; it’s the best horror experience I’ve had on the Playdate so far.
As someone who has a penchant for all things spooky, when exploring the Playdate offering I was mostly interested in seeing how the developers would bring horror stories to life on the strange little handheld. Halfway to dawn takes a mixed approach: the first half is a text-based narrative game in which you scavenge for resources and prepare for the long night ahead; the second half is a fierce fight for your life against an onslaught of sinister creatures.
Halfway to dawn wastes no time in creating a mood of desolation and impending doom, starting with a dialogue from our protagonist who says he feels “as lifeless as these scattered remnants of humanity” in a city plagued by a nameless terror. During the narrative portion of the game, you must choose between various locations to visit – the mall, the pharmacy, a gun shop, and a house – so that you can hopefully find things like first aid kits, weapons, ammo, and traps. But there’s no way to predict whether each of these outings will be successful.
You might find a box of shotgun shells, but never get your hands on a shotgun to actually use. You might even get injured while looting. There’s also the option to rest, which refills your health bar (while you start with full health in easy mode, two of the six health points are already depleted in hard mode). But after each selection, an hour passes, and you have to keep an eye on the time. The clock starts running at 6 p.m., and once it strikes 1 a.m., you’re forced to go out and defend yourself from the monsters until dawn.
From this point on, the game becomes a top-down shooter – and depending on how well you manage your resources, a pretty challenging one. Monsters will attack you from all sides, some of them harder to defeat than others, and you can only replenish ammo and first aid kits from your limited supply during set breaks after an hour. If you run out of ammo before then, you’ll have no choice but to try to fight off the monsters with a knife you can swing with the crank. This is about as effective as you’d think.
Halfway to dawn is a very, very short game, but some playthroughs had me really sweating. It’s fun to keep coming back to, as the randomness of resource collection makes for a different experience each time. And the tension of it all is perfectly rounded off by a synth-heavy soundtrack (available on Bandcamp) that could have come straight out of an 80s B-horror movie. If you’re into scares, this is a game you should definitely check out. Halfway to dawn is available for $5 in the Playdate catalog and on itch.io.