A novelty meme game

Loituma Girl Playdate is a free app available for the Playdate handheld device. It is a very simplistic novelty app based on a popular meme/character known as Leekspin. In the app, the Loituma Girl (Leekspin) character is on the screen, and the player must turn the Playdate’s crank to make her sing and spin the leek that she is holding.

This game bears similarities to other Playdate games, such as Super Corporate Tax Evader or Pulpmon. Loituma Girl features a black & white color scheme and utilizes Playdate’s unconventional crank controller.

A Leekspin recreation

Leekspin, or Loituma Girl, is a flash animation that became a popular meme around 2006. It features an anime girl spinning a leek around (also known as a Welsh onion) while singing “levan polkka,” a section from a Finnish song. Essentially, this app is just a recreation of that animation on the Playdate, which means reducing the meme to a two-color display.

Control the meme

The app is not an entirely passive experience. The animation does not play by default, and the only way to get it playing is to turn the Playdate’s crank control. The animation plays in relation to the speed of the crank, so turning it slower will make the audio and animation run in slow motion. Going faster will speed it up. It can also be turned in reverse.

A novelty app

Loituma Girl Playdate features a detailed recreation of the Leekspin meme despite being constrained to a two-color display. However, the entirety of the app is the manual control of this animation and audio clip. There is no win or lose target to aim for or avoid in the game, making it little more than a novelty application.