Ball x Pit Review

The roguelike/lite concept has prevailed in games in the past few years, especially within the indie scene. This phenomenon has been propelled by developers’ seemingly simultaneous conclusion that adding features we associate with the word rogue – tough but bingeable runs and drip-fed progression – to very traditional and familiar gameplay, from digital to tabletop, is a largely un-fuck-up-able recipe. If you can take anything from a platformer to a shooter, an arcade, card, or parlour game, and make it hate me? I’m there, day one.

Ball x Pit reimagines the classic brick breaker/ricochet games of the early era – where players would move a paddle along the bottom of the screen to bounce a ball into rows of bricks at the top – as a neo-gothic-flavoured roguelite with a sniff of city building and a ball-fusing twist.

This new joint from Kenny Sun and publisher of plenty of other weird shit, Devolver Digital, begins with the fall of Ballbylon. Wiped out under meteoric circumstances, all that’s left of the once-great city is the gaping maw of the Pit. Rising from the ashes is New Ballbylon, a city built on the rim of this seemingly-bottomless chasm that will thrive on the plunder and trade of the resources found within – and that’s where you come in.

The major of two distinct strains of gameplay in Ball x Pit is your descent into the pit. Portioned into 15-ish-minute runs, you’ll pilot your character across a vertically-scrolling stage and face down hordes of enemies, attempting to survive all the way through to a boss fight and reap the spoils. Flavour comes from the balls your character shoots, which feature a huge variety of potential magical properties. As you move through each stage and collect dropped gems, you’ll get more chances to obtain these unique balls with things like elemental status effects, AOE damage, enemy piercing, health-stealing and dozens more fun things.

So victory then comes from choosing (and hoping for the choice of) the right combination of balls to tackle the task at hand. As you delve deeper, you’ll even start fusing and evolving these balls. An astonishing number of new and surprising combinations await discovery, and proves a key source of joy as you go. Physics also matter, naturally, with plenty of opportunity to ricochet balls off walls and enemies for increasing devastation – something again affected by whatever messy combination of balls, boons, members and modifiers you’ve got going on.

Each of the game’s 20-odd unlockable pit-divers have their own quirks and modifiers to the game, some to wild results. I’m hesitant to spoil the surprises in store, but there are participants here that can genuinely, fundamentally change how the game is played. As added motivation to try them all out, unlocking subsequent layers of the Pit requires completing the current one with multiple characters, a feat that becomes more approachable once you earn the right to pair them up for combined effect.

It all gets pretty hectic pretty quickly, and there does come a point where you have to accept that there’s no better strategy than popping off balls in any direction and hoping for big damage. But to embrace the chaos, and to do so at 3X speed, is to play Ball x Pit correctly.

There’s a wonderfully unsettling style to this assortment of ball-chuckers, to the ball icons and just about every element of the game’s presentation. It’s a busy but lo-fi-passing combination of pixel art and low-poly 3D that oozes style but remains very readable even with shit firing off in all directions. The visual and auditory feedback of a steady stream of orbs knocking about the place is like a warm hug to my lizard brain, which is a good spot to be in for a run-based accomplishment simulator like this.

Ball x Pit’s arcade brick-breaking inspirations run so deep that even the titular Pit’s hordes of beasts and baddies are bound to their own boxy prisons, shuffling ever forward in their walled war-wagons. Most are simple squares, but you’ll also run into rectangles, more complex shapes and even multi-level stacks inhabited by unique enemy types with their own abilities and durability. It’s quite the sight to see an army of living skeletons or ancient, armoured warriors advancing toward you while hanging out of concrete and brick containers.

There’s more to the experience than just busting balls and bricks, though, with your secondary goal of rebuilding New Ballbylon introducing a sort of city-building meta game. I say ‘sort of’ because it’s nothing close to a management/strategy affair and more of an upgrade system with extra steps. As you play each level, you’ll often unlock new building blueprints which can be used to erect new digs in your city, and each unique building type then unlocks upgrades and buffs for your ball-breaking. These can range from stat boosts to extra ball and passive slots or simply unlock whole new characters.

The trick with this part is you’ll also need resources and manpower to build these structures, and for that you’ll continue the ricochet tradition by sending your current roster of characters bouncing around the city collecting wheat, wood, stone and gold from wherever you’ve placed resource tiles. It’s a novel way to integrate the game’s overall concept into even these segments. And because you’re initially only able to send your little folks out to harvest once per round of pit diving, you’re incentivised to play around with building and resource placement to maximise your one shot – and to go back for more punishment, of course.

It’s a loop we’ve broadly seen before, but it’s especially insidious (complimentary) here, where you’re tempted to dive into the pit just one more time to secure your next harvest, expecting to die within a handful of minutes. But by some chance of the character you’re encouraged to pick, the random balls and fusions you end up with or just a stroke of skill, there you are for another 15 minutes and reaping enough reward to be suckered into even more city building.

As far as roguelites go, Ball x Pit is surprisingly finishable, with tons of permanent upgrades to unlock through your city and through obtaining and developing each character. I’d knocked it over within about 12-15 hours, but have managed to sink double that in again, simply for the fun of true completion and the added challenge of a New Game+ feature.

Final Thoughts

No thoughts. Just balls.

Reviewed on PS5  // Review code supplied by publisher

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