Peglin (2024)

Seriously fun, the game has grown a lot since it first came out. In fact, my only nit pick is that I think the game needs a tiny bit more to it still, but I suspect that it will get that before too long and in the mean time is still a great game inspired by the likes of Slay the Spire.

4 / 5 Stars

Man, I'd do anything for a balanced version of this game. Love everything about the concept and the core gameplay loop - it's Peggle as a roguelike - but man oh man is the balance a major problem. It feels like it gets worse every update too, which is unfortunate since there's so many great ideas here. It's overtaken Slay the Spire as my go-to game when I don't know what else to play so I've spent a looot of hours here and I genuinely do love the game if not for the balance issues.

Some of the core problems:

• Too many of the orbs and relics are either completely utterly useless, or they're an actively bad choice that makes your deck worse by choosing them. It feels like only a small subset of them are even useable, let alone good.
• On top of that, every update brings even more orbs/relics, and it's gotten to the point where your choices are so clogged up with bad options that your run is essentially doomed from the start if you don't get certain options offered to you. It's not even really a matter of "getting good", it's straight up impossible to even make it out of Act I for most runs due to the sheer terribleness of the orbs offered, so at higher levels I end up restarting at least a dozen times if not more just to get a viable starting setup.
• Healing of some kind is critically important but nearly impossible to come across. In earlier versions of the game you were likely to see a healing orb or two every run, but since so many orbs have been added, you rarely see them anymore and it's incredibly unlikely to win without it.
• Act I difficulty is wayyy too high, and the subsequent acts are a cakewalk by comparison. There's no smooth difficulty climb as you go - pretty much if you make it past Act I, you're most likely winning the run because all the difficulty is frontloaded.
• Some enemies are just straight-up unfun to play against and have little to no options for counterplay. One example is the mirror, which deals a large percentage of damage done back to you when hit if it's not killed, meaning you can easily 1-hit KO yourself if your throw is good enough to deal a lot of damage but not quiiiite enough to kill it. There's no real way around it either, since your only choice is to kill it in one hit (almost entirely RNG based) or get killed yourself.

Ok ok ok, that's my rant. Anyway I still give this game a high rating and a recommendation, because it's a great concept and it's a lot of fun when you get a good run going, and it is under active development so I'm really hopeful the devs can figure out the balance issues one of these days. Until then I'll just be playing lower difficulty settings, where the balance problems aren't quite as severe.