Here’s What Happens When You Combine A Nintendo Switch And A Kindle

AMOLED displays are all the rage on the latest Android retro gaming handhelds, but a new design uses something far more efficient: E-Ink. The Figment is a new conceptual design that combines a Nintendo Switch-like form factor with an E-Reader display to create the perfect device for choose-your-own-adventure-style games.

Coming from the mind of tinkerer Pedro Porras Luraschi, it features a 7.5-inch E-Ink display, with four buttons serving as a D-pad and three face buttons on the other side. The body is a combination of 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, and an ESP32 microcontroller powers the whole thing.

It won’t run any modern emulators, instead using a mix of pre-written adventure stories and AI to create text-based gameplay. The game engine uses AI to generate images to match the stories and text for paths not written by the original author. The low-power chip can’t run an LLM on-device, so it requires an internet connection to work. The developer plans to save generated content onto the device for offline play in a future update.

This is the second E-Ink handheld to be announced in the last few months, following a short-lived crowdfunding campaign for the Ink Console earlier this year. Another team took over that project this month, but no further news has come of it yet.

For now, the Figment is merely a proof of concept, but the developer may open-source the hardware and game engine if it gains steam. To learn more and get the latest updates, sign up for the newsletter on the official website.

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