Ball x Pit review – a laboratory of potential

Ball x Pit (from here on out I’m going to call it Ball Pit, because that x is more than my brain and my typing fingers can handle) (Editor’s Note: not if I can help it!) is the latest roguelite from Devolver Digital. But it’s also the latest game from Kenny Sun, a developer I’ve been following, on and off, for ages.

Kenny Sun makes games that seem to be based on deep obsessions. For a while, he was really, really into triangles, and some great games came of those triangles. Now he’s into Breakout, by the looks of it, and the results are a game that’s very complex and also utterly simple. The best kind of game, if you ask me.

Breakout’s the old Atari number that turns Pong into a PvE experience. You have that ball bounding around, and you use it to smash rows and columns of blocks to score points. Ball x Pit takes all that and turns it into something more of the moment. You pick a hero and advance up a channel on the screen, while rows and columns of blocky horrors spawn above you and advance towards you. You fling a load of balls at them to slowly whittle them down, and if any reach the bottom you take damage from them. That’s it at its simplest.

And at its simplest – don’t know if this is just me – it feels like being caught in a typesetter’s cheese dream. Here are these advancing rows of what strike me as being typeface blocks, and you have to get rid of them all before you’re wiped off the screen and, somewhere I can feel it, poorly printed pages are piling up. Even if this isn’t your reading, there’s a lovely urgency to the idea of smashing things to pieces before they overwhelm you. It’s a thrilling basis on which to build other stuff.

This is where Ball x Pit gets complex. As you defeat enemies by aiming balls and flinging them across the screen (you can do all this automatically, by the way, all you do is aim the angled reticule for shots and move your own character around), you collect the XP gems that defeated enemies drop. Every now and then you level up, at which point you can choose a new skill or perk.

Often these are new types of ball – elemental balls, say, or vampire balls that leach health from enemies they defeat, or balls that send either horizontal or vertical laser beams when they strike; they’re a good bunch however they work. Sometimes they are perks or other ideas. One of my favourite perks, for example, means that all enemies you defeat will explode, damaging enemies on either side of them. Another adds critical damage if your attacks hit them from a certain side. Another adds a little stone fellow who rumbles up the track towards your foes every so often doing a little damage. Another is a turret. You get the idea.

This is all great. But you only have four slots for different types of power, and as you level these quickly fill up. Here’s where things go from complex to dizzyingly complex. You can pick up these other little things that dead enemies drop – little spinning orbs – and these either allow you to level up a bunch of your existing powers at once, or merge them together in various ways.

This doesn’t just allow for fascinating new creations – laser beams that cause bleeding damage, earthquakes with a lightning chaser – but they also open up slots again, because you’re taking two powers and turning them into one weirdo-power. This means that you can then collect new abilities again, and by the end of each run – levels are themed and have a few mini-bosses and a mega-boss at the end – you’ll be spitting out absolute chaos with every step.

All this, right, and it’s still Breakout. Which means, yes, while you’re dealing with vampire balls and heavy iron balls that move slowly but do extra damage and anything else your mutations have cooked together, you can still apply the rigours of good Breakout behaviour. Fling your attacks so they bounce up the side of the channel and then rattle around behind enemies and you can do loads of damage to the back of the advancing army while you then rattle away at its front too.

When the damage is happening and the effects are going off and the screen is flashing and flickering, it’s like watching the crowd at a stadium concert. You can choose perks that make attacks like this stronger, but you can also get in trouble, as your ammo is out there pinging away interminably, and hasn’t returned to you to be reused elsewhere.

Add in those different level themes – sand and ice and that kind of thing; the fungal level is an absolute pig – and then add in different heroes you can unlock, who all change the way you approach things. My favourite of these is a character who makes all your levelling choices for you. It’s like a little of Marvel Snap’s Agatha Harkness crept into the game. My second favourite is the twins, who have half the power but double the weaponry, and their aims are inversions of each other’s. (My least favourite will probably be my favourite in a few days: they attack from the back of the stack while moving around at the front. Gosh, they’re hard to get to grips with.)

This, deep breath, is a lot of Ball x Pit. A laboratory of damage-dealing, and, as is often the case with roguelite RPGs, a laboratory of self: who do I want to be for this run. But there’s still more. And this involves what you do between runs. Back home, at the top of the pit, you can spend the resources you collect in runs and build a little town, planting crops and placing any buildings you’ve unlocked, which will give your characters stat boosts, perhaps, or even unlock new characters. This town must be harvested by sending out little farmer types who act just like the weapons you’re using on runs, bouncing off walls, collecting grain and rock and building structures as they go. It’s Breakout whichever way you look.

It’s lovely stuff, this game. It’s another Kenny Sun delight, his first with a team along for the ride too. It can be a bit grindy at times, particularly when unlocking new locations for runs, but the grindiness isn’t grindiness if you’re the kind of person who likes trying out different builds and different evolutions of power. It’s the best kind of intricate, daydreaming fun. Get in, I reckon.

A copy of Ball x Pit was provided for this review by Devolver Digital.