Ball x Pit — Indie Game Review
You know that feeling tornadoes create? They arrive, destroy everything, and disappear. That’s exactly how I felt about Ball x Pit. I devoured the game, was hooked on it for a few days, and then it was over. It’s really good. Really, really good!
It’s been a great year for solo developers. Ball x Pit is another one of those, but in this case, I’m not surprised, as it’s perfectly possible to imagine this scenario considering its brilliant simplicity.
There can be no greater guarantee of quality than being published by Devolver Digital, and the fact that it’s on Game Pass allowed me to try it out with xCloud while I was waiting for a doctor’s appointment. From then on, it was a whirlwind. I couldn’t stop playing it!
It’s touching how easily we are fooled by Ball x Pit, since its biggest flaw is that it flew a little under the radar, and if it weren’t for the multiple podcasts I listen to, it could have become just another game that appeared on Game Pass, and I didn’t have time to play. What a waste that would have been.
It’s relatively easy to describe its gameplay. Ball x Pit is a bullet heaven roguelite in which you advance along a narrow vertical path with walls on both sides, destroying enemies with balls that you shoot and bounce in a mix of the very well-known Space Invaders and Devilish, an obscure game I played on my Game Gear in the early 1990s.
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There are different types of balls: the baby balls are the simplest, most numerous and have no special powers, but every time we destroy an enemy, a gem appears which, when picked up, gives us experience to level up, and each time we do so, we gain access to a new ball or a new skill, a bit like in other bullet heaven games. These balls we have access to have much stronger special powers than the simple babies, and we can even fuse or evolve them as long as the appropriate gems appear.
Each level takes between 10 and 15 minutes, has two mini-bosses and a final boss that always seemed much easier to defeat than any of the previous ones.
Each time we finish a level, whether we win or lose, we have the opportunity to interact with a field where we can collect resources or place buildings that offer us different buffs or unlock different characters. To unlock all the benefits of the buildings, we have to build them, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. To do this, we have to get our characters to interact with them by hitting them. This happens using the same pinball mechanics that our balls have in the main game. Of course, we can ‘cheat’ and place the new buildings at the beginning of the area where we interact, thus ensuring that our characters hit them. After that, we can move them to a place where they won’t cause any issues, but in reality, doing so isn’t much fun.
Each new character discovered brings with it a new skill or a new ball. Some skills only have positive points, but many lead to interesting decisions, as they put us in situations that can be very favourable with the minions, but unfavourable with the bosses, or vice versa.
The mergers themselves can be considered, because although they are all positive, if only because they make room for a new free ball, some mergers are much more useful than others, and there are even some that we only do to make room for another ball, even if it is the same one that is already merged.
It seems very simple to make a brilliant game, but if it’s that easy, why did only Kenny Sun think of doing this? I would venture to say that after the draw, even I know the lottery numbers. Ball x Pit is yet another of the countless fabulous games that have come out this year. It may not be the best, but it’s very close, and if you haven’t played it yet, its price doesn’t even warrant waiting for a promotion; it’s really worth grabbing right away!
Even better than all that, I managed to finish this text without making a joke about Brad Pitt’s balls… ohh wait!
