Time travel is real, ya’ll. I’ve experienced it in a few different ways, but the most recent of my trips forward through time, where magically a few hours have just vanished before my eyes, were experienced with a healthy dose of brickbreaker roguelike BallxPit from Kenny Sun & Friends. Its smart reliance on clever angles, interesting build options, and great art design all coalesces to generate the kind of singular, focused attention you feel when staring into a campfire for a long period of time–just imagine you’re in control of that fire, letting it grow in ferocity by chucking balls into it.
BallxPit’s premise is rather simple: In the fantasy realm of Ballbylon, a massive meteor has dug a hole, or pit, if you will, in the ground where a once-great civilization stood. Now it’s up to you and your cast of funny little heroes to venture into the depths to beat back the encroaching monsters by spitting balls at them.
That is what it seems is happening. It’s a little gross if you really think about it…so try not to.
BallxPit fuses together elements of a number of genres, but at its core it’s a brickbreaker (think classics like Breakout and Arkanoid) in which you march toward advancing enemies, firing a variety of projectiles to wipe them out. Each map I’ve played thus far also includes two mini-bosses and one main boss, who introduce some bullet hell scenarios for you to survive.
As I mentioned earlier, you fight back by spitting balls at the enemy hordes. For the most part these balls come in two basic types: baby balls and more powerful balls on which different status effects can be stacked, combined for greater effect, and evolved into more powerful versions of themselves. Once a ball is in play, it will bounce around the level, hitting walls or monsters. Once it comes back to your character, you can spit it back out to start the process all over again.
You can use up to four different main balls at any given time. You’ll have the chance to earn one each time you level up by collecting enough gems from fallen enemies, and you can level up these balls up to three times. Fusion pickups, meanwhile, let you sometimes combine balls to merge their effects, thereby opening up a new slot so you can acquire a new ball. I’m still unlocking new balls, but one of my favorites so far is Laser, which comes in a horizontal or vertical variety and nails multiple enemies with a satisfying beam of death. It’s perfect for crowd control. Freeze is another handy ball which, as you might expect, will freeze enemies for a specific amount of time relative to its level. As you play, you can snag a “Fusion” pickup to combine these into a “Freeze Ray” which includes both freezing and the lane- or column-spanning laser. Another great combo is one that fuses the earthquake ball and poison ball, allowing you to poison multiple enemies in an AOE attack. There are a ton of different combinations like these and given the randomness of the roguelike genre elements, if you’re not building your way to a setup you already know and rely on, then you’re instead likely to hit upon some new and surprising ways to combine powers. It’s a satisfying buildcrafting experience.
Accompanying these balls are up to four passive abilities which can do everything from increasing your damage from specific angles to speeding up your movement or upping your defenses.
It all combines for a very satisfying, though challenging, game loop that only becomes more irresistible as your destructive capacity grows. And though it may look wildly chaotic at times, blasting through the game’s hordes of satisfyingly animated enemies isn’t just a mindless march forward through pixely carnage; while my first few hours were spent just jumping into the fray to see what happened, the ways you can combine different powers and use angles to bounce balls deep into the enemies’ ranks encourage you to play smart to be sure you melt them before they reach you. But if you’re often overwhelmed when games hoist multiple coexisting systems upon you at once, relax; BallxPit lets you jump in without much homework, and you can pick up the basics of what each ball does in real time.
Making things all the more engaging, you’re regularly increasing in power as you play. Defeated enemies will drop anything from resources for your base to fusion powerups that let you level up or combine more powerful balls, as well as healing potions (they’re very rare, though) and gems, which will steadily increase your level meter. And you’ll level up fast. If you enjoy a rapid progression in power, well, BallxPit is quick to give it to you. Enemies drop so many gems that you’ll quickly ascend in levels. Hit a new level and you’ll get a choice of three possible powerups, either a new ball or a passive (once you’ve leveled up all your balls and passives, you’ll just choose one of three resources for your home base). Just blindly grabbing a new ball or passive ability won’t always work if you don’t take a beat to figure out what kind of build you’re going for. Are you combining balls to up your AOE attacks? Are you investing in upping your speed output? The random, roguelike features of the game ensure that you probably won’t fall into too many predictable builds, but over time you’ll start finding patterns you prefer.
There’s also a whole farming management sim built into the game as well. I haven’t spent as much time building my base as it seems the game wants me to (the brick-breaking portion is very hard to put down). But every time you complete a run, you can choose to back to your base which, at first, looks similar to your home in other farming sims: You’ll put down plots of land with farmable resources, build housing units for your characters, and send your characters out to gather wood, rocks, and wheat.
But it’s the way you lay out and farm for resources that makes all the difference. True to its form as a brickbreaker that has you firing balls of destructive energy at your enemies, BallxPit turns farming into a situation where angles really matter. Your characters will sprint around your base for a certain period of time, colliding with various plots of land to mine the resources in each tile. So as you determine your base’s layout, you want to create one that maximizes your harvest based on the angles at which your characters bounce.
Your resources grow back pretty fast, too. So every time you finish a run in the pit, you can usually come back to your base to start farming with the potential for a decent harvest. Though I’ve yet to enjoy the untapped potential of setting up an efficient, well-designed base for my characters to bounce off of and farm, this complementary game mechanic helps BallxPit avoid a sense of redundancy that might otherwise have set in if there was nothing breaking up the ball-spitting, brickbreaking action. I always feel like there’s something new to do, whether that’s sending a new character down to polish off a previously finished map, returning to base to farm resources, unlocking a new character by building a new housing unit, or continuing to expand and grow my base.
BallxPit has been a wonderful time in my half-a-dozen or so hours with it, and has become an easy go-to option when picking up my Steam Deck without a clear game in mind to play. The diversity of build options helps keep runs feeling very fresh, and I’m still discovering new ways to plow through hordes of enemies, whether that be cool new builds or a fun way to exploit various angles that I hadn’t considered before. I don’t think watching balls rapidly bounce all over the place while enemies perish in various ways and damage numbers satisfyingly pop up over their heads will get old anytime soon.
