Nearly 50 years ago, Atari published Breakout, a spin on the ball-bouncing gameplay of Pong where your opponent wasn’t another player but rather an increasingly dense wall of bricks slowly dropping down towards you. Arkanoid, released not long after, expanded on its foundations, giving players more ways to play through the introduction of upgrades to your paddle, spawning additional balls, and more.
These are two games that Ball x Pit designer Kenny Sun was clearly inspired by, but not the two that this modern interpretation solely borrows from. Instead, Ball x Pit is an intoxicating mash-up that includes elements of Vampire Survivors, numerous roguelites, and town-management wrapped up in an engaging adventure down a bottomless pit that is chaotic and engaging, but also slightly messy in its execution.
Like its inspirations, Ball x Pit is easy to understand. You play as one of a variety of characters, each with their own abilities, flinging balls at waves of enemies slowly descending towards you. Your balls bounce off of walls and enemies to damage and eventually eliminate them, preventing them from reaching the bottom and damaging you.
As in Arkanoid, you’ll acquire various power-ups that change up each run in a variety of ways, imbuing your balls with new abilities and giving you more ways to deal damage. Enemies aren’t as static as the multi-colored bricks of the past, either, firing projectiles towards you that force you to move around the narrow arenas while still accurately aiming your stream of attacks. All of this is enclosed in brief but exhilarating runs, culminating in bullet hell-like boss battles, before you take your rewards back to the surface and do it all over again.
If the setup is similar to Breakout and Arkanoid, Ball x Pit’s chaotic gameplay channels Vampire Survivors. Seemingly endless hordes of enemies are thrown at you, with your attacks (which can be optionally automatically fired) rapidly evolving through limited upgrade choices to prevent them from overwhelming you. As you destroy enemies, they drop collectible gems used to fill a meter and, eventually, level up. Each level gives you a choice between three items, split between two categories: a variety of new balls or a selection of various items with passive abilities.
The different balls drastically change how each round plays out. Some are straightforward: fire balls burn enemies, ice ones freeze them, and vampiric ones leech life back to you. Others are more fun, like vertical and horizontal lasers that damage enemies in columns and rows respectively, brood mothers that spawn more baby balls, or light balls that blind enemies and increase their chances of missing their attacks.
Passives also alter how you play and help define your approach to each run. Some will make attacks on certain sides of the arena deal more damage, while others might provide damage buffs before a ball is bounced off the walls and other enemies.
You are, however, limited to just four slots for each, and this is where Ball x Pit’s complexity starts to surface. At various points during a run, you’ll have the option to fuse balls, smashing together their distinct properties and freeing up a valuable slot for another ball later on. Evolutions are a step beyond fusions, requiring two specific types of balls to transform into a wholly new one that is both more powerful and features new effects. For example, a burn ball and an iron ball (which moves slower but deals more damage) can be evolved into a bomb ball, which explodes on impact and deals damage in an area, but has a large cooldown between uses. These evolutions can then be fused again with other balls you already have, or evolved even further with the right combinations.
The interactions these fusions and evolutions create are a delight to discover. A laser ball that would usually just strike enemies in a line might now bounce violently between them, imbued with poison to ensure enemies keep taking damage for a handful of seconds after. But since that ball was also fused with an egg sack, each of those hits also spawns a few other baby balls, each of which might contain an elemental effect you fused into them earlier. It’s a satisfying cascade that turns the relatively tame action at the start of each run into a frantic symphony of effects, the screen filled with explosions and particles as enemies melt away in front of you. Ball x Pit derives a lot of its fun from experimenting with all the different ball and perks types it has to offer, and how quickly you’ll go from the slow, tame beginnings of a run to the unhinged chaos of its final boss.
Different characters inject variety into each run, but also challenge you to approach them with different strategies. Some early favorites of mine included the Repentant, whose balls get increased damage with each bounce, while also dealing extra damage as they return after hitting the arena’s back wall. Other later options are more complex and require some caution, like the Embedded’s balls that pierce enemies on the way up, but not on the way back, which can cause them to get stuck behind rows of enemies if you aren’t careful. Most new characters are a joy to take out for a run, but there are exceptionsThe Cogitator, who picks upgrades automatically, is a good example, with its poor and non-synergistic choices making runs feel unnecessarily wasted.Most of the roster have quirks that might not make each run as optimal as you’d like, but keep them consistently entertaining nonetheless.
Ball x Pit’s action is at its best when you hook together balls, character traits, and perks that make you feel like you’re breaking the game, unleashing combinations that clear the board of enemies so quickly that it makes victory seem like a foregone conclusion. It does this without completely sacrificing challenge and, much like its inspirations, still requires some careful thought into how you’re combining an assortment of offered upgrades. Losing, however, is somewhat drawn out. Builds that prioritize damage can sometimes be ineffective at clearing out large crowds, making the dense walls of foes slowly trudging towards you feel like a slow death. Conversely, some bosses are very bullet spongey, punishing builds that focus on clearing enemies quickly. It draws out the final encounter and makes it a punishing battle of attrition that can be a sour end to a run that was otherwise going well just moments before.
Losses are also inescapable due to the way progression is structured, and how that ties into the progression of each character. Each run you complete with a character levels them up, which provides passive bonuses that makes each new run slightly easier. Each stage also requires you to beat it with an increasing number of different characters before you can progress to the next one, which forces you to consistently choose new characters. This inadvertently makes pacing uneven, as you’re forced to tackle harder stages with characters who haven’t been upgraded at all. Although it’s never severe enough to halt progress entirely, that requirement can introduce some speed bumps to your progression that feel entirely artificial, where your skills aren’t enough to outpace the reality of just not having enough damage or health to make it. This is mitigated by runs rarely lasting more than 15 minutes, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.
Roguelite elements are introduced between runs, specifically when you return to the surface. Here you work to expand a small town on a grid, placing down tiles for different resources (like wheat, wood, and stone) and buildings (which unlock new characters and provide permanent stat buffs) of various shapes and sizes. Each character you’ve unlocked resides here too, and is used during the single harvest phase you have between each run. These require you to aim your characters into your town and fire them off like balls, with each one grabbing resources that encounter aiding in the construction of each incomplete building they bounce off of.
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Since you only get one chance between each run, you’re encouraged to frequently reconfigure your town to find the most efficient route for your characters to follow, carefully predicting where their movements might take them. Even with this care, it’s far too easy to make a miscalculation and have one errant bounce waste the entire run, preventing you from taking a new character or enhanced attributes with you into your next run . It’s a mundane task that’s also an inescapable part of progression that keeps you from getting back to Ball x Pit’s best bits.
Ball x Pit shines brightest when it’s letting you loose on enemies ahead of you, and giving you the tools to concoct your own brand of unstoppable chaos to fill the screen. It’s easy to move from one run to the next when you’re filling just a handful of minutes with thousands of enemy kills, accentuated by bright explosions and dizzying particle effectsBut your momentum can also be frequently halted by the vital town management moments in between them. Progression through Ball x Pit’s campaign can feel uneven as a result, but, that’s easy to overlook when the majority of the runs you embark on carry the potential to both surprise and delight in equal measure, with enough variety to keep the action in your final hours with the game as grin-inducing as your first.