I first laid eyes on Ball x Pit at a presentation given by its publisher, Devolver Digital, in London back in January. I knew instantly that I had to play it. I was reasonably (or perhaps, unreasonably) sure that I was going to love it. This will be one of my games of the year, I said to myself, for no good reason.
I was right, but not because the game is perfect. In fact, having now played the finished article, I can say that it’s quite far from perfect; sometimes, it’s quite annoying. I was right because Ball x Pit is such a good idea, assembled in such an original way from so many other preexisting good ideas, and expressed with such clarity and love by developer Kenny Sun, that you only need to watch a few seconds of game footage to get it.
As easy as it is to grasp, however, Ball x Pit’s weird genre stew is not so easy to set down in words. Let me have a go. It’s a bit of Vampire Survivors, a bit of Breakout or Peggle or Holedown, a smidgen of bullet-hell shmup, a soupçon of deck-building roguelite, a dash of Diablo, with a light side dish of city-building. It’s a game about firing a stream of ricocheting balls at a descending wall of bricks, but the bricks are enemies who shoot back, and the balls are upgradeable and have special properties like area-of-effect damage, and the hero who fires the balls while dancing around the slowly scrolling battlefield also has special properties and is one of several you can collect and level up. The whole thing is dressed up in a tongue-in-cheek, grainy, PS1-era dark fantasy about descending into a giant pit where the city of Ballbylon once stood in search of treasure and resources.
Just like Vampire Survivors, Ball x Pit has a remorseless, attritional simplicity, underwritten by a judicious dose of randomness. It’s a game where you turn autofire on in the first five seconds of play and hardly ever turn it back off; where you’re half active participant in the carnage and half delighted spectator, watching the blizzard of little balls gradually batter the parade of block-bound enemies into oblivion.
It works like this: You steer your hero around the battlefield with the left stick and aim the stream of balls with the right. If the brick bad guys reach the bottom of the screen, or hit you with their projectiles, they harm you. It’s important to stay on the move, partly to dodge attacks and refine your firing angle, but more because you need to pick up the experience gems and other items that enemies litter the field with as they expire. With each level up, you choose from a random draw of new or upgraded balls and passive skills.
You can hold up to four balls, with abilities like lasers that damage every other enemy in a row when they hit, or birth new baby balls, or leech health. But you can also combine balls via fusion pickups, which stacks their status effects, or through evolution, which creates entirely new, more powerful balls. Each run starts you from scratch with that hero’s default ball (although base stats and character level persist), so you’re creating a fresh, half-random, half-intentional loadout each time.
Ball x Pit is just extremely moreish and fun, combining intense action with a kind of pleasurable passivity and a sense of constant, semi-automated progression, and punctuating the action with frequent micro-decisions that keep things interesting. It could be better balanced, however. Runs are long, often up to 20 minutes to defeat the final boss of each layer, and there’s only so much variety to be gleaned from the choice of hero and the draw of balls and skills. Bosses are damage sponges with giant health pools. The layers themselves aren’t randomized, and each needs to be defeated with at least two different heroes to unlock the next. Because heroes level independently, it’s hard to avoid settling on two favorites rather than exploring everything the roster has to offer.
Runs are interspersed with a curious base-building minigame. At the lip of the pit, you gradually build out a township with the resources you collect, and between each run you can harvest crops and complete new buildings by firing and bouncing your heroes around as if they were balls. Buildings bestow permanent buffs and unlock new characters. Early in the game, with only a handful of heroes, this is a painfully slow and unreliable process, and requires constant rearrangement of your layout for any kind of efficiency. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not that fun in itself, and it’s questionable how additive it is to the core action.
Do I care? Not really. The base-building is a mild palate-cleanser that breaks up Ball x Pit’s irresistible white noise: the pitter-patter of balls grinding away at the advancing wall of bricks, the rhythmic chant of the bricks as they hymn their steady march, the glittery tinkle as I hoover up XP gems. Balls bounce, enemies advance, my numbers go up, their numbers go down. It’s mathematic but also messy, skillful but soothing. I can’t get enough of it.
Ball x Pit is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a copy provided to Polygon by the publisher. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
