Ball x Pit is a deep, delightful rabbit hole

It took me a while to get into Ball x Pit. The new roguelike blends elements from games like Breakout, Vampire Survivors, and even city builders, creating a complex mix of ideas. But as is the case with many roguelikes, once I figured everything out well enough to get a taste of my first win, delving back into the pit for another round was all I could think about.

Ball x Pit barely has a story — it’s more like a setup. The initial moments of the game show a multi-tiered Gondor-like city called “Ballbylon” being struck by a giant, glowing rock (ball?), and all that remains is a giant pit that “treasure seekers” aim to explore. Then, you’re dropped into the action. Initially, as a knight-like character called “The Warrior,” you move around a narrow playing field, shooting balls up toward steadily advancing hordes of enemies. Your character fires automatically and you have infinite ammo, letting you focus on aiming your shots for optimal bounces and picking up gems and other goodies dropped by defeated bad guys.

Like in Vampire Survivors, when you pick up enough gems, you’ll gain a level, which improves your stats and gives you the chance to choose some kind of upgrade, like special balls that can poison enemies or activate lasers. Occasionally, enemies will drop little rainbow spirals that can level up a bunch of your upgrades at once, let you fuse balls together to combine their powers, or evolve two balls into a special new one. With the right combination of upgrades, you can get extremely powerful, with balls and effects flying around the screen as you wipe out the enemies and bosses. When you finish a run, win or lose, your character gets experience that carries over so they’re more powerful in future runs.

After a run, you can choose to visit “New Ballbylon” for the other part of Ball x Pit, which involves base-building. During this phase, you can set up things like plots of wheat and forests for resources or buildings that open up new characters and permanent stat boosts. To harvest resources or build things, you’ll have to send out your characters to bounce against the plots and structures by aiming them like you do in the main part of the game. You can also upgrade structures so they offer better perks, and you’ll eventually be able to make buildings that will auto-harvest resources for you.

Initially, I didn’t like the base-building; I just wanted to keep doing the main runs. But once I had a good engine for resources and understood how upgrading buildings worked, I was spending a lot longer than I expected optimizing my base, which had the added benefit of making things easier when I jumped back into a level.

Some buildings unlock new characters, and they’re nearly always worth the effort: the characters have wildly varying playstyles that keep things fresh. One character gets 5 percent more damage for each bounce, so I’d try to shoot balls into tight corners where they’d ping wildly and potentially rack up serious damage. One character makes the game turn-based. Another character automatically picks their own upgrades, and one of the last characters that you can unlock plays the game entirely on their own, which I found very useful while trying to grind some late-game levels and upgrades.

By the end of my time with Ball x Pit, I will admit that I started to feel a bit of the emptiness I do when I play Vampire Survivors now. Once winning became more routine, I started to focus on maximizing things in a way that felt more obsessive rather than fun. I’m even ashamed to say that I let the auto-play character handle a bunch of runs on the last level while I went and did other things.

But when you’re in the zone on a good run, the game is a delightful, colorful, and chaotic experience that feels like a hyper-extreme version of the classic Breakout. With so many characters to play and ways to improve your base, Ball x Pit goes deep.

^{Ball x Pit is out now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S, and is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 on October 28th.}