Ball x Pit is a glorious reworking of Breakout, with a Roguelite twist.
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.
