Ball x Pit (2025)

One of my indie-gems from 2025. A really fun and addictive roguelike game. I would call it a mix of an old game from my childhood, DX Ball, mixed with Vampire Survivor. That mix is a bit different but works out really great.

The game focus on a tight gameplay loop rather than a story. The goal is simple, to survive waves of enemies and clear two mid bosses and one bigger boss on every level. You start with one character and through progression you unlock new characters, all with a unique skill and starting element of power. During a run you get new balls with new power, that fully upgraded can be combined with other balls for a new evolved ball.

Between every run there’s a basebuilding management as well. You build houses and farms, to gather materials that you then use to build even more. These buildings adds skills for your characters too.

It’s a perfect game to just pick up and play a run or two. One run takes about 10-20 minutes which makes it perfect for short sessions, ideally on a handheld. I played on Steam Deck but it would be perfect for Nintendo Switch too!

I’ve completed all levels and unlocked all blueprints available. Still it’s fun to continue, try to complete all levels with all the characters. I’ve also have a lot of different combinations of balls to try out.

Simple, addictive and very hard to put down. Lots of replay value. Big recommendation and quite cheap!

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲🌲➕

BallXPit is good but there's a nagging flaw that I can hopefully explain. The trifecta of pleasures that make Roguelikes of its ilk, particularly Balatro, so enjoyable are:

1. Exponential numerical spectacle, like the way the multiplier rattles up when all your Jokers are firing off.
2. Randomness and the resultant synergies, which often feed into 1.

BallXPit has both of these. The way different balls can be fused and evolved is cool and impressive, as are the modifiers that come from using different villagers. The bank of core effects are perhaps a little staid, and while the wall of visual noise you create is part of the fun, beyond a read of the effects and how quickly things are dying, it's hard to gauge intuitively what impact levelling up, fusions, and evolutions are having. But where BallXPit mainly falls short is that it's missing the third thing that makes Roguelikes like Balatro so good:

3 Subversion of genre conventions.

Balatro is almost-illicitly thrilling is the way it superficially looks like poker and uses standard playing cards, but is nothing like playing poker. Even without all the mad modifiers, the format isn't poker, you don't play other people. It's not even like video poker. Poker is merely an aesthetic conceit. And yet, that conceit adds so much to the experience. It feels like breaking the rules to have a deck full of queens or to play a straight but be allowed to skip a number. Even if you don't know poker, you probably know playing cards, so what happens in any round of Balatro feels uncanny and exciting.

BallXPit is Vampire Survivors but Breakout. It looks like Breakout but you don't particularly need to worry about catching the balls when they drop back down. It's really closer to a vertically scrolling shooter but with bouncing ammunition. That subversion, right? It looks like one thing, but behaves like another. But not really, because, even when things are going crazy, it still kinda looks and feels like a version of Breakout, but without any of the arcadey tension of potentially missing the ball. It's, forgive me, uncannily canny. For all of its aesthetic flourishes, genre-mashing, and its framing as something idiosyncratic, both from the game itself and its status from being published and marketed by Devolver, it's pretty straightforward.

It's still fun, and is a playful, in some ways more refined experience than its closest inspiration, Vampire Survivors. But even that was more successfully subversive: a twin stick shooter where you don't get to do the shooting.

Great game for any fans of balls and pits combined I guess.

It's pretty addicting and has become my latest mindless steam deck game. This is very similar to Vampire Survivors, and other survivors-likes, except the gameplay loop is bouncing balls to break enemy "blocks". The game even pretends you have to press a button to shoot for a bit... until you just turn on auto-shoot and never look back. However, the gameplay is much more active than most survivors-likes as your character's positioning and how you aim the balls to optimally bounce really matters.

Other than that it has the addictive power upgrades and evolutions of your special balls. It even has a city building type thing to do between runs and that is satisfying enough. It definitely doesn't have as many upgrades and as much content as other survivors-likes however, all the characters you unlock do play significantly differently.

I also like that runs are pretty short, maybe 15minutes tops, great for quick play. I like it and its addicting. Good steam deck game.

4.5/5

Ball x Pit is an indie rogue lite game playing very closely to old school Arkanoid or Breakout. A run consists of picking from a variety of characters who all have a starting ball with differing abilities and different starting stats. You'll face various waves of enemies while upgrading and adding to your offense or defense in additional balls or charms that provide various passive abilities. There are two mini bosses you'll face before then getting to the final boss of each run/level. Equipment that you pick up during a run can then be used to upgrade your town which you return to after each run. This adds a city builder like element that also utilizes the bouncing ball mechanic as each time you return you can send out your roster of playable characters to bounce around the town to collect additional supplies, build buildings, or other activities.

The game starts of relatively difficult as it takes a while to understand how all the systems work together. Pretty quickly, you'll unlock additional characters/balls/passives/buildings that all start to make runs a little bit easier. Just as the game starts to plateau, it throws a mechanic twist in that really freshens up the runs and adds some more strategy to each run.

By the end, you can get a setup where the game will literally play itself. I used this for achievement cleanup to remove a lot of the tedious aspects as achievements include completing every level with every character, as well as fully filling out the encyclopedia. In total, I was able to 100% the game in just over 45 hours, though that could have been done quicker if I was manually playing instead of setting it up to play itself. The last few achievements to complete the encyclopedia were a bit of a pain as in most rogue lites it requires some luck in what abilities you are able to select.

Overall this game is really fun and addicting! It's pretty cheap sitting at $15 full price and every bit worth that amount and more. There's a demo that you can download to try it, as well as play it on Xbox Game Pass. I played it on Game Pass for about a half hour before realizing it's a perfect Steam Deck game, so I purchased it for convenience of play and to support the really small dev team.

BALL X PIT is a weird game that has a lot of different identities and core premises that don't really mesh that well together, but somehow make for a novel game at the least.

BXP is essentially a brickbreake roguelite that is incredibly heavy on metaprogression. The core game loop consists of playing runs with the different starting characters, and then spending metaprogression resources on upgrades for the next run.

Of these gameplay elements, the interesting one is the actual gameplay. Each major ball in the game has unique properties, and can be "evolved" with other balls to make completely new ball effects. Existing balls can also be fused to combine their properties to make neat results - for instance, fusing the fire ball that inflicts burn with a larvae ball that creates mini balls produces a larvae ball whose mini-balls also inflict burn. The ball evolution & fusion mechanic is easily the best part of the game, and playing around with the different combinations is great.

The main problem I have with the game is that the early game is incredibly dull, bordering on an idle game. After you get a few hours into the game, there really isn't a ton else to see that you haven't already seen. The game is so heavily reliant on metaprogression that you never really feel like "wow, I had a god run this game!" - none of the builds really gave me that feeling of a significant power progression within each run. You finish a run, and it just kind of feels okay, I guess. When you fail a run, it's usually a sign that you need to grind more upgrades than it is something you did wrong during the run.

Some of the later levels in the game require more dodging, or enemies will have mechanics that you actually have to play around, but most of the gameplay still feels pretty similar regardless. I really think if the gameplay pace was faster - both you and enemies dying quicker - the game would be far more interesting.

The art is neat. Each character has its own health bar decoration, and enemies in different areas have their own unique models. I want to applaud the rest of the game because I really feel like this game has a lot of potential, but I just feel so unenthusiastic about the gameplay and the grindy metaprogression. This is unfortunately not a recommend from me.

This game is basically an eletronic version of crack. I think I played it for 15 hours in 2 days. Needless to say my productivity went down the drain.

But seriously, it's good, fun, addictive, rewarding. I just didn't give it 5 stars because I think it could use a little more polishing on the story side (since they actually decided to make one) and the replayability after you beat it is kinda lazy (just the same levels, with more difficulty and faster time).

Ball X Pit has immaculate vibes. The music is like chiptune White Lotus. The aesthetics are crunchy low-poly chibi early 2000s MTV animation. It's a delight to see the screen light up with the power-ups from your chosen balls. There is so much joy to derive from the sights and sounds of BXP.

These vibes make for a great introduction to BXP's brick breaking game play. I was resistant to folks' comparisons to Vampire Survivors because especially early on, the way you bounce your balls matters. The process of developing techniques that create and take advantage of confined spaces where your balls can ricochet for exponential combos is exciting and empowering. Unlike Vampire Survivors, Ball X Pit has gameplay.

However, after ten hours you have explored most of what the game has to offer. There are still more vistas to explore, characters to unlock, and buildings to add to your base, but you have exhausted all that the game has to teach you. A lack of learning opportunities is not necessarily the death knell of a good game, but soon after it comes... Ball X Pit gives you a character who plays the game for you. My kids saw the game playing while the controller was sitting on the side table. They asked what was going on. I joked that the game was mining for crypto. I stopped playing after that.

Ball X Pit is a fun concept in a pretty package, but it didn't need to be a Roguelite, and it especially didn't need the drug addict progression of Vampire Survivors. Just stop playing when you stop having fun.