Struck Out (Playdate)

English · Français — fully playable in English and in French. Entièrement jouable en français : textes, scènes et menus.

The chronicle has a hole in it, and your name is next.

In the realm, a name counts only if it is written in the King's Register. Pell's never was. When the Rubric comes to strike his village from the chronicle, a boy with a borrowed sword gathers whoever will follow him — an old soldier, a smuggler, a sister who tends the sick, a scribe who kept twenty years of erasures — and starts writing back.

Struck Out is a story-driven tactics RPG made for the Playdate, with an ink-and-paper look: woodcut-style portraits, maps and cutscenes, all in black and white.

Every fall is final. A companion struck out in battle is crossed out of the chronicle for good: the scenes after go on without them, and the people who loved them remember. To soften a mistake you can turn the crank back and undo your last move — three times per battle, a drop of ink each time.

What's in it

• 13 chapters and an ending, plus 4 marginalia: side stories written in the chronicle's margins, in a small and careful hand that isn't anyone's. Find them all for a final page.
• 15 characters with woodcut-style portraits and their own voices; 12 pairs who grow closer by fighting side by side, with talks to read at camp and a bonus in battle.
• Six classes across a three-way weapon triangle (Quill beats Paper, Paper beats Ink, Ink beats Quill), promotion at level 10, and the companions you leave in camp keep learning.
• Varied missions: escorts, holding a line, a battle in the fog where the map is literally unwritten, a fire spreading through an archive, an enemy you can talk into standing down.
• A camp between pages: choose who fights, equip weapons and salves, buy tonics that raise a stat for good.
• Made for the crank: turn it back to undo a move, forward to hurry the enemy's turn.
• About 4 hours for the main story, closer to 6 with every marginalia.
• English and French (Settings → Language). Three save slots, and a battle is kept if you close the game or the Playdate falls asleep.

Controls: D-pad to move the cursor, Ⓐ to select and confirm, Ⓑ to cancel, the crank to undo and to hurry the enemy. The first battle teaches the rest, one step at a time.

Install: download the .zip, unzip it, and sideload StruckOut.pdx at play.date/account/sideload (or drag it onto the Playdate's Games folder in Data Disk mode).

Struck Out is made by Calade Games.