BALL x PIT is a neat little indie game that fundamentally plays like a mix between Breakout and Space Invaders. Enemy blocks spawn up at the top of the screen and inexorably march down towards your player character. You fight back by lobbing an aimable stream of balls, bouncing them everywhere as balls tend to do, but you also have the ability to move your little dude around at will to dodge attacks and get a better angle. Break a bunch of waves worth of brickmobs to fight a mini-boss, defeat two mini-bosses to take on a boss. Beat the boss and proceed to the next arena.

…but there’s more, because we can’t just smush two games together any more. Killing mobs drops XP and Gold, which lead to a Vampire Survivors-style upgrade system that provides you with both “Special Balls” that have a wide variety of effects (Elements, Damage-over-time, Propagating debuffs, Nuclear Weapons, etc), and Items that give you an equally diverse variety of passive effects (like increased crit-chance when hitting from a specific cardinal direction). You can level up your balls and items by picking the same kinds when offered, and once you hit a Level 3 Ball or Artifact you get the opportunity to fuse or evolve two of them. All Special Balls can at the very least be merged (which just puts their two effects on the same ball), but many have special bonuses that unlock if you merge them, like combining Flame + Iron gets you a Bomb, which you can then upgrade to level 3 and merge further with other ball types down the line.

Between runs you’re brought back to a city on the edge of a giant pit where the great city of BALLBYLON once stood, before it was crushed by a giant ball. This city builder side of the game is very reminiscent of the town builder in Loop Hero, where you harvest resources while you’re off on a run, and then different buildings provide different permanent buffs for your next run. Blueprints for new buildings drop while you’re playing, and buildings might let you harvest different resources, or improve your damage scaling, or unlock a totally new character. There’s also an active “harvesting” mode where once between runs you can build stuff or collect resources by summoning all your characters, pointing them at your city you’ve built and launch them in a line to bonk against buildings and rocks and trees and whatever. So it’s not just a game of Building-Tetris, trying to figure out how to optimally lay out your city, you’re also trying to build paths between the buildings both to collect your resources and keep your buildings upgraded.

The game starts unlocking a shockingly sizable cast of characters quite rapidly, each of which brings an interesting twist to the basic ball-shooting mechanics. My personal favorite was the guy with a penetrating shot that stops penetrating only when it hits the side walls, so you can take a really oblique angle to hit a bunch of bricks on its way out, then bounce off a wall, then get “stuck” behind the enemy lines. But that’s just one of them: there’s also a character that shoots from the top down, one with a giant shield you can bounce balls back up with for extra damage, one that only shoots Special balls, etc. There are also a couple goofy ones like THE COGITATOR who basically sets the game on Random Mode by auto-selecting options when presented with upgrades.

Compexity-wise the game really opens up once you unlock the ability to combine characters by taking out two at a time, as yet another layer of stuff to combine in the game. So you can combine penetrates enemies + bounces off a shield, or auto-picks your gear + has two shooting reticles. Or nearly any of them, only a few are considered fundamentally incompatible. It’s neat, it leads to the game rapidly exploding into incredibly broken combos and balls flying all over the screen constantly and everything’s set on fire and taking damage over time and then exploding again when it dies, just amazing levels of chaos. It, however, also sort of cracks the game in half to the point that everything works. The fact that characters like THE COGITATOR aren’t actually detrimental to your gameplay most of the time is an indicator of just how ludicrous the scaling in the game gets.

I had some builds late in my path to 100%‘ing the game where it was simply impossible to lose, every fourth ball was both penetrating the whole field, one-shotting everything in its path, and doing area-of-effect damage to immediately destroy everything around it too, leading to full-board-clear bonuses every couple of seconds. It’s like when you hit those super-rare combos in Vampire Survivors where all of a sudden you realize “Oh, I don’t actually have to move anymore, I can just put the controller down and go make lunch”. Except it’s where basically all builds end up by the end of a run. That’s the BALL x PIT endgame experience.

It’s a good game, though. Sometimes it’s good to have a game that isn’t perfectly balanced and scales in difficulty such that you’re constantly just barely squeaking through levels. Sometimes it’s good to have a game where you’re constantly making everything explode and increasingly large numbers are flying out of every brick every second. That’s this game. It’s good, but I’m also done with it. Easily recommended, even more if you can find it cheap.