Here comes a ball – a great big wrecking ball, ready to smash down the headquarters of productivity that might otherwise control your life. Kenny Sun Studios’ Ball x Pit is a mercilessly addictive mix of, well, a lot of stuff.
First, take a big dollop of Vampire Survivors and a healthy scoop of Breakout – then just mix in little pinches of almost whatever you feel like: Puzzle Bobble, Balatro, Space Invaders… and maybe even a tiny sprinkle of Stardew Valley for good measure.
But if this roguelite concoction sounds like a pure distillation of all the addictive gameplay ideas from history — and if that puts you off — just hang around a little longer. Ball x Pit definitely brings enough structure and variety, and demands enough creative thinking, to be well worth the time it will inevitably eat up.
You start as a knight at the bottom of a vertical channel. Up top, a small horde of skeletons drops in and starts clomping slowly downwards. They need smashing, and for that, you have a collection of balls. Here’s where the Breakout-ness comes in: bounce the balls to gradually smash the skeletons. Unlike Breakout, you don’t need to stop the balls from falling off the bottom of the screen (although you can catch them if dexterous enough): they’ll just bounce back into your hands, ready for another throw.
The super-satisfying strat in Breakout is to get the ball on top of the blocks, so that it ricochets about, wreaking havoc without you having to do anything. That’s a killer move in Ball x Pit, too, but there’s a catch. If you’ve got your balls bouncing about up above the enemies, then the enemies on the front line are marching in untouched.
You need to balance the high damage-per-second latticework of rapid bounces with route-one attacks on the clear and present danger edging towards screen bottom. Any beastie that gets there will make a final lunge and bite off a chunk of your health meter. That’s where you’ll frequently meet your demise – drowned in swathes of enemies, pinned to the bottom edge.
Now, where do the Survivors ideas come in? Well, you start with a handful of “baby balls” that deal minimal damage, plus one special ball that delivers greater damage of different kinds depending on the ball. These include burn, poison, freeze, various area-of-effect attacks, and more. Pressing ‘X’ toggles auto-fire. I pressed it exactly once, turning it on, then concentrated only on moving in two dimensions with the left stick while aiming with the right.
As enemies are dispatched, they drop crystals, which can be collected to get new special balls, help items, or buffs. You can hold up to four special balls at once, but once you reach capacity, rainbow collectibles allow you to fuse or evolve balls to combine two into one, presenting you with a spare slot to pick another. Each special ball can also be levelled up twice, enhancing its power.
The result of all this is total chaos. Enemies are launching projectiles, you’re launching projectiles, your projectiles are launching projectiles, and even little golems or turrets you can pick are launching projectiles. In summary, there are a lot of projectiles.
Reading the action is confusing at first, but soon becomes clear as you learn what you need to dodge and what you can collect. Consistently fluid performance helps no end in enabling this flow state that is the powerful hook of the game.
To assist in finding that flow, the soundtrack offers a haunting, trancelike electronic beat, with enough drive to pump the adrenaline as bosses arrive and enough dreaminess to drift off into ball heaven when a rare safe patch arrives. The sounds are wonderfully moreish rattles and bounces, clicks, pops, growls, and grunts: rhythmical and tight, firing happy feelings in the brain.
So far, so compelling. But how does this formula avoid getting samey? If we zoom out a bit, there is actually a narrative setting for the game. The city of Ballbylon (yes) has been destroyed, leaving behind a vast pit. Descending into the pit via an enormous lift is what takes you to ever deeper levels, each new one unlocked by completing an earlier one with two different characters and gaining special cogs. This overworld provides a space to gain those new characters and to buff them, and it’s managed, remarkably enough, through a base-building mechanic.
You gather gold while playing the main game, then can use it to purchase a wheat field. Harvesting wheat lets you buy a forest and harvest wood, and so on. Harvesting is done by firing your characters across the base like balls themselves. They ricochet off things and collect resources from the tiles they touch.
Among all this, you can build. Blueprints collected in the pit enable construction of homes for new characters (more play variety and more harvesters) and other buildings that increase stats or improve the rate at which characters develop.
The base building is a different flavour of addictive; it keeps you wanting more, but gives you a break at the same time. A round of building and harvesting clears the mind and sets up the next run in the pit. Jumping back in is satisfying, but it’s also a good time to turn off, knowing your next go is ready to take you even further than before. A built-in reality check is a welcome addition to such a compulsive genre.
Conclusion
Ball x Pit is a tremendous brew of so many ideas it ought to collapse under the confusion. However, it operates in such perfect balance that it appeals both to the one-more-go instinct and to more cerebral planning and creativity. Kenny Sun Studios set itself a heck of a challenge but, fortunately, hasn’t dropped the ball.
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