Halfway to Dawn (Playdate) by Cyberleaf Studio

Halfway to Dawn is a short (but challenging!) cinematic horror-themed game for the Playdate.The game follows the protagonist’s struggle to survive a night in a dystopian world, where only a few humans remain after a mysterious monster invasion.During the day, the game is narrative-based as the player scavenges the city for weapons and resources. At night, the game transforms into a top-down shooter survival game, where the player must fight off waves of monsters every hour.The game is challenging and requires strategic decision-making, quick reflexes, and some luck (and sometimes wildly swinging your knife with the Playdate crank as your last resort!)
Art, game design,  coding & audio – Andrea Baroni – andreabaroni.com
SPECIAL THANKS TO:my wonderful family, my Patreon supporters, Rodrigo @ Paradnight Studio, SquidGod, Brighton Indie Social and Canteen.
🎵 SOUNDTRACK ALBUM NOW AVAILABLE:
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2833292843/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=0f91ff/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/

GAMEPLAY NOTES & TIPS:– You will need a good amount of bullets to be able to pass the night. The place where you decide to scavenge will of course affect what you are going to find, even if there’s always luck involved.- Situations might have random results, or fixed. It’s up to you to risk it and find out which are the possible outcomes.- If a scavenging session ended up being disastrous you can always restart the game from the Playdate menu. Or you can try to survive anyway and make the most of what you have found!- Knife is a powerful last resource, but also a good way to save bullets when the situation is not too dangerous. You will need two swings of the knife to kill the littlest of monsters before they hurt you, so you need to be quick (please don’t break your Playdate crank though!).- If you don’t like the knife game mechanic you can always disable it from the Playdate menu. In that case, monsters will damage you but they will also die automatically when reaching you. When the knife is disabled you can also use the crank to rotate the weapon if you like.- When approaching monsters are very close by to each other you can try to kill both of them with a single bullet… very efficient!- Skallarach (the shooting monster) will die on its own after a few shots… just in case you run out of bullets and you have no way to hit them. Pray you won’t die before them though.- In Hard Mode there will be a final monster. A big one (no spoilers!). But don’t despair. There is a way to kill it using just two bullets 😉

HOW TO INSTALL: #

After you download the zip file containing the pdx you need to **sideload it into your Playdate account.**Please check this handy guide from Panic or this nice how-to video from @Ledbetter if you don’t know how to do that.