Faced with a world-ending winter, would you endure the cold and risk freezing to death, or freeze yourself to survive it? That’s the dilemma at the heart of Ratcheteer DX, a compact Zelda-like set in subterranean cryo colonies during an extinction-level ice age. It’s a thoughtful premise for what is, at its core, a delightful bite-sized dungeon crawler.
If you grew up playing Game Boy Color games, Ratcheteer DX will immediately tap into retro nostalgia with its sprites and visuals. Yet it also establishes a clear identity of its own, standing apart from the many Zelda-inspired homages thanks to its lore-rich worldbuilding, stellar chiptune score, and a tightly designed toolkit where every item serves multiple roles.
You play as a mechanic responsible for maintaining a colony of people preserved in cryogenic sleep to ride out a planetary winter. Along the way, you encounter communities who choose to brave subzero conditions and an alien race who are EarthBound-esque in their oddball charm. Your role ultimately becomes to win the trust of these disparate groups to avert disaster.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)
Ratcheteer originally began life in monochrome on Panic’s Playdate handheld, standing out as one of that quirky little system’s most ambitious titles. The DX edition, also published by Panic, brings it to Nintendo Switch and PC in full colour and with streamlined controls. Turns out that it fits right in and feels destined for the bigger stage where it now finds itself.
Originally designed around the Playdate’s two buttons and distinctive hand-cranked dial, the DX version alleviates the control limitations inherent to the original hardware and feels noticeably more fluid. Tools are intuitively button-mapped, allowing you to access abilities without constantly dipping into menus to swap equipment or check your map and inventory.
While I still have a soft spot for monochrome visuals and crank-controls, there’s no denying that this is the definitive version of the game. Ratcheteer DX spends most of its four to five-hour runtime earning your affection but occasionally testing your patience, too, with unforgiving platforming and slippery edge detection spurring bouts of trial-and-error frustration.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)
By the standards of the Playdate, Ratcheteer is a thoroughly dense game with a sizeable map, plenty of NPCs and collectibles, and several varied boss encounters along the way. On console, however, it comes across as comparatively modest in scope. That’s not criticism, given that the adventure never outstays its welcome, but it does feel distinctly compact.
Armed with a lantern and a ratchet sword, you begin Ratcheteer DX navigating dimly lit environments where visibility is deliberately constrained. This results in visuals that aren’t particularly striking from the onset, though they will vary and brighten up as you progress, with the lo-fi pixel art increasingly taking on various soft pastel palettes.
Certain dungeons and parts of the overworld are dimly lit, and your lantern both lights the way and exposes the vulnerabilities of early-game enemies. Your ratchet sword also pulls double duty, serving both as a damage dealer and puzzle-solving tool. In classic Zelda fashion, each self-contained dungeon introduces a central mechanic crucial to defeating a boss.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)
You gradually acquire items that widen your move set, from boots that allow you to jump, to a drill that can block attacks and break through walls, as well as a tool that will put a big smile on the face of Sonic the Hedgehog fans. With each boss defeated, you recover a component used to repair a mech that you ultimately pilot during the game’s final showdown.
Though the five dungeons are a bit too visually similar, their compact layouts are well-structured and purposeful, with locked doors, hidden shortcuts, and rewards like heart pieces and alien runes that felt satisfying to discover. The overworld is likewise tightly interwoven, with earlier areas concealing secrets that only become accessible once you’ve acquired later tools.
Stone wells scattered across the map reveal a hidden underworld that functions as a makeshift fast-travel system, which makes backtracking less onerous. Ratcheteer DX doesn’t attempt to reinvent the Zelda-like action-adventure formula, but solo developer Shaun Inman understands it deeply and executes it cleanly enough to merit attention from fans of the sub-genre.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)
What is arguably less well-executed is the platforming, which for me was the most persistent source of frustration; edge detection feels far tighter than the game’s otherwise forgiving nature warrants. Odds are you will frequently slip off ledges inadvertently and lose health. A glide ability that’s easy to overshoot compounds the problem.
Ghost enemies in the fourth dungeon can sabotage your jumps in a way that feels borderline unfair, while snow quicksand patches punish the slightest positional error with a full-screen reset. These wrinkles never quite cross into dealbreaker territory, but they test your patience more than they should. That said, all of it is surmountable with persistence and precision.
Qualms aside, it was exceedingly easy to get sucked into Ratcheteer’s world. The chiptune soundtrack is a significant reason for that. Its melodies blend heroism with a quiet undercurrent of melancholy that suits the frozen, dystopian world perfectly. From wistful overworld themes to punchy boss encounters, the score’s tonal presentation was consistently spot-on.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)
Ratcheteer DX targets a smooth 60fps on the Switch and, as you’d hope, it ran flawlessly during my playthrough. It has four colour palettes — full colour (the clear standout), black and white, Playdate grey, and a Game Boy ‘pea soup’ green — alongside display overlays like scanlines, dot matrix, and grid filters, plus multiple scaling options, all of which are a welcome touch.
Conclusion
Ratcheteer DX may not break new ground, but it’s a genuinely charming, lo-fi action-adventure that feels perfectly suited to the Switch eShop. It boasts clever and engaging gameplay, an evocative chiptune score, and its five-hour runtime feels just right. A little more platforming forgiveness and this would be an easy recommendation. As it stands, it’s still a very good one.
