What a crazy crossover event Ball X Pit is! Who could have foreseen the rotund, spherical ball franchise matching up so well with a great big hole IP? Well, golfers, I suppose. In all seriousness, Ball X Pit is a melding of so many genres and games that the titular ball and the pit feel like the nominal components here, with solo developer Kenny Sun having crafted one of the best arcade roguelite crossovers we’ve ever seen.
You’re a treasure hunter, out to delve into the depths of The Pit, bracing yourself to fight off hordes of monsters on your way towards a huge boss. What does that mean in terms of gameplay? Your character fires a steady stream of balls to cause damage, projectiles bouncing around the arena like a riff on Breakout or Arkanoid, and you’re left thinking about angles, avoiding arrows and ice spears, while collecting experience gems from the fallen.
Here’s where it gets interesting. You can carry up to four special ball types. These range from balls that cause bleeding or inflict poison, to slow and ultra-powerful types, or ones that cause lightning to arc between enemies. As you progress, you’ll find Fusion drops alongside the experience gems, and these can do various things to your special loadout. Fission will upgrade them, by up to two levels, increasing damage or area of effect, while Fusion can happen between two, fully levelled special balls, amping them up and combining their effects into one ball.
Evolution is what you’re really looking for. Certain ball types can be combined through evolution into hybrids, gaining additional effects, and making your chances of success even higher. The thing is, you really have to plan ahead, and Ball X Pit isn’t necessarily the kind of game to allow you to do that.
There is a frantic pace to Ball X Pit, though you do have some control over that, with a speed control that’s been nabbed from an RTS. The oncoming hordes that move down the screen are insatiable, and the start of each foray into the Pit is generally balanced on a knife-edge, and it’s that which makes planning ahead difficult. You have three choices each time you level up, but you are still at the mercy of a random drop, so having specific builds in mind is all well and good, but you might have to abandon them in the heat of the moment, and hope that something good comes your way next.
Ball X Pit is a roguelite. Each run into the Pit earns your character experience, permanently levelling their stats, and gaining various other boons along the way, making it more likely that you can tackle the increasingly difficult levels as you descend further.
Ball X Pit throws a swift curveball into this mix, with the way it deals with your ongoing growth. Outside of the Pit, you work on building a settlement on the surface. This hub plays host to the housing for each of your characters, buildings that offer permanent upgrades that carry across all of your team, and then forests, fields and boulders that you use to accrue the resources to build and expand further.
This in itself is a unique addition to the formula, but then Ball X Pit messes with it some more by making it an offshoot of the ball-bouncing gameplay itself. In order to collect resources, or finish buildings, you have to bounce your characters around the town area like pinballs, hopefully completing the jobs you want, or nabbing enough of the particular resource you need.
There’s a really in-depth spot of tactical town planning needed here, and you can rearrange the buildings and fields to your heart’s content. So, you can make a narrow corridor of buildings that need finishing if you want, or a slew of forests at the front of the town to ensure you get plenty of wood. Equally, you can shift other buildings out of the way if they don’t have anything useful to offer at that moment, and it gives you a real shift in atmosphere and thought compared to the main game.
It can introduce some early frustration, though. I initially wasn’t thinking it through fully, and through repeated harvests, I didn’t manage to grab the things I needed. There’s a balance between predictability and chaos that feels quite slim, but there are ways to make things more certain by changing the layout, which I really started to appreciate as I got deeper into the game.
Crucially, it all fits together incredibly well. The central gameplay is exciting, and immediately rewarding, feeling like a vertical shooter as much as a Breakout-style ball bouncer. It is arcade-y and, by its nature, repetitive, but if you find that feeling of zen from a million things pinging around the screen, there are few games that can come close to Ball X Pit’s immersion.
The town building adds to that, with your downtime bringing you a host of things to consider, and upgrades and resources to focus on. It’s slightly retro-esque looks complete the experience well, and they’re topped off by the constant gothic rave of the soundtrack. I have to say, Ball X Pit feels like more or less a perfect game to me, building on several classic genres and ideas, while infusing them with unique and rewarding new ideas.
