Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
A brief perusal of my Steam library reveals the following, almost certainly incomplete, list of genres, basic concepts, and overall game design ideas that designers have sold me on “roguelike-ing up” in recent years: Poker. Slot machines. Blackjack. Claw machines. Pachinko. Mining. Match 3 jewel puzzlers. Haunted houses. Peggle. Werewolf. Being a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Slot machines again. And now Breakout, courtesy of Devolver Digital’s new release Ball x Pit. It truly is a golden age of doing something kind of badly the first time, spending 90 different currencies to make yourself slightly better at it, and then doing it all over again.
I’m not trying to be too harsh on Ball x Pit, which is the creation of designer Kenny Sun (and his hundred-or-so credited “Friends”), and is genuinely fun, albeit in a slightly mindless way. The game works by basically taking Breakout and turning it up to its consequence-lite maximum, setting your various characters against wave after wave of helpfully square-shaped foes that you’ll then bounce a wide variety of specialized balls off of, whittling down their health and, in perfect circumstances, sending attacks bouncing into little corners that then ricochet off of dozens of enemies before finally bouncing back to you. I will note that the game very deliberately drops the most interesting part of Breakout—the danger of missing a ball, which generates massive tension between managing speed and angles versus basic “catchability”—in favor of a more generic health system that occasionally adds in some basic bullet hell gameplay. That loss of precision is great for allowing the game to achieve its sought-after sense of “everything’s exploding!” maximalism, but robs Ball x Pit of a ton of weight. The game instead tries to rebuild tension by cribbing heavily from Vampire Survivor—right down to straight-up copying its fireworks-evoking lootboxes—tasking players with filling limited inventory slots with ball types and upgrades that race to maintain damage with enemies’ rapidly growing health bars. The result is a very flashy, but also a very shallow, toybox: I can’t remember the last game of this ilk where I was less excited to unlock new weapons, new levels, and even new character classes, because, guess what, they’re all basically going to be about firing balls at a very similar slate of generic enemies.
The hook, such as it is, is going to come from that “C’mon, just do one more run” roguelike structure, where the game encourages you—with new unlocks, and a little “base building, and then bouncing off of” harvesting minigame—to dive back into the Pit after every victory or defeat. And maybe this is just old age, general fatigue, or the fact that I just dropped 30 hours on Hades II, but the lure has rarely felt more mechanical. I ran into something similar with recent zeitgeist-gripper CloverPit, which—in my brief time with it—felt like an attempt to shave many of the more mechanically interesting edges off of TrampolineTales’ genre-defining Luck Be A Landlord, douse the entire thing in aesthetics lifted liberally from Inscryption (but without that game’s fascinatingly weird lore), and call it a virally successful day. But the basic assumption that anything can simply have “You die, you click some buttons to get slightly better, you do it again” applied to it, and automatically hook people’s brains, is starting to feel both more cynical and less true by the day. There’s a neat idea inherent to “Breakout as combat,” even if it’s not a new one. (Wizorb came out in 2011, and Super Nintendo title Firestriker was poking around at this concept back in 1993.) But not every game is improved by planting little dopamine traps all up and down its upgrade curve.
Again: I actually like Ball x Pit, which is a pretty, reasonably engaging timewaster. The art and music are all great, and I’m not immune to the allure of watching my screen explode because I’ve just launched a ball that does mass poison damage, and fires lasers of ice across the screen, and makes my enemies explode into fountains of me-healing blood. But it’s also just the latest example of a glut of games that think that smashing any game idea together with the trend du jour is a recipe for success—and an apt illustration of the limits of that approach.
