BALL x PIT Review — Plundering Ballbylon

When you review as many games as I do, and as frequently as I do, you don’t always get the chance to look into them much before you start playing. I usually try to make a brief assumption of what I’ll be getting into based on a game’s title, and half the time I know exactly what I’ll be reviewing, while the other half I end up surprised. Certain games, like BALL x PIT, give very little to presume based on the title alone. Even if it had, I don’t think I would have been ready for what this Devolver Digital original had to offer.

BALL x PIT is a roguelike game that seems to seamlessly combine elements of pinball, Tetris, and base building into its incredibly original whole.

Following the fall of Ballbylon (get ready for a lot of ball puns in this title), treasure hunters seek to plunder the seemingly bottomless pit of monsters that remains, using the gold and resources gathered to build the city of New Ballbylon on the surface.

This narrative translates to the game’s core gameplay loop, which, as I mentioned before, combines Tetris and pinball into a unique roguelike experience. Your character moves forward on an ever-moving plane while enemies move down the screen in the shape of block-like pieces filling up an invisible grid. If you get too close or if they reach the bottom of the screen, they attack, damaging your rather small health pool. Like many roguelike titles, if you die, your run end,s and you must return to your home base with whatever resources you managed to collect.

Your means of fighting back against these hordes of undead blocks are balls. Your character, either on mouse input or automatically (depending on which settings you play on), throws out any balls in their inventory. These balls bounce off surfaces and deal damage when colliding with enemies, eventually bouncing back to the bottom of the screen, where they are returned to your inventory and fired again. If you manage to catch the balls early, you can instantly fire them back out.

Your character carries an inventory of “baby balls,” which are small pellets that don’t do much damage, and “balls,” with each of the latter being a unique projectile with its own effect. Your character brings in one special ball at the start of the run, depending on who you play.

If there is something I often praise or criticize about roguelike titles, it’s the uniqueness of power-ups and abilities handed out during a run. While many games forgo special abilities in exchange for statistical increases, I think that giving the player a wide range of good-feeling, unique powers is the only real way to do the genre. I would rather an ability feel special and unique than receive an unspecial, boring increase to one of my stats.

BALL x PIT excels in this regard. It hands out player powers in two ways: passive changes to the functionality of your balls or balls themselves, which have unique abilities of their own. Throw a bleed ball to do damage and cause a bleeding effect, a column laser to blast your enemies in a line, or a ghost orb that passes through enemies and deals damage all the way.

Even better are fusions and evolutions, modifiers you find during your run that are designed to both increase the power of your abilities and clear up space in your inventory to grab more. Fusions simply combine two abilities into one, giving you both effects on one ball, while evolutions combine two balls to create a completely new effect. It takes the uniqueness and fun of the game’s power-ups and makes them even more engaging, keeping you from getting bored during your 15+ minute runs into the pit.

Outside of the pit, you play something of a mini city-building game to progress, planting and collecting resources and building structures to unlock new characters or effects. Even in this meta-progression system, the ball-bouncing mechanics remain present, as you must pinball your workers between the resources or buildings to collect them or finish constructing structures.

I didn’t know what to expect when I was given the opportunity to review BALL x PIT, but what I ended up with was a game that I could gush about for hours. Beyond the core roguelike loop, which I think executes the genre’s staples incredibly well while also providing a very unique twist on the genre itself, the game also blew me away with its art, worldbuilding, and music.

The dark fantasy aesthetic is one that I am a huge fan of, and it’s delivered upon incredibly well with BALL x PIT’s macabre pixel art. Nowhere is it more noticeable than in the enemy designs, featuring gruesome monsters depicted in various stages of decay or anguish. Even the playable characters bring an edge with them, with the totally-not-a-host-of-evil-bugs character also being a rather grim sight on my screen.

BALL x PIT is incredible and offers players a lot of replayability with little to no repetitiveness or frustrating features. It has become one of my new favorite roguelikes and is a game I’m jumping right back into once I finish writing this review.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of BALL x PIT. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! BALL x PIT is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.