Self-labelled ‘autobonker game’ Ballionaire is to Pachinko as Balatro is to Poker; A mutated bastardisation of a classic game that’s fun to play, brimming with character and incredibly hard to put down.
‘I’ve played Pachinko Roguelikes before’ is one of the most weird sentences that I’ve ever written, however having invested far too long in both Roundguard and Peglin I think I’m possibly as qualified as could be. That said, critically, they were Dungeon Crawlers, and their digital forefather Peggle was an energetic digital twist on the arcade format. Ballionaire is, in fact, perhaps closer to Balatro — in board gaming terms an engine builder (rather than just a deck builder) — with you almost instantly breaking the rules and standards of the classic game it initially masquerades as to score high, rather than progress level to level.
That’s the thing. Ballionaire starts incredible simple, as Pachinko, but then quickly descends into a pit of absolute chaos as you carefully place spawners, movers and other verbified-nouns that ultimately gob other balls, fire off multipliers, guzzle up or even chop up balls and more. Oh how simple it seems simply slamming a couple of whales, dams and clouds down, but all of a sudden your target score is six digits long and every ball you drop causes a massive explosion of chaos, raining balls from outside the field, deactivating and firing off the pegs you’ve placed and, well, sometimes you might even pretend that you knew that it was going to happen.
The fun is that you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Pachinko itself, perhaps moreso than other ‘mechanical’ games like pinball, are already impossible to fully predict due to momentum, force, speed and the positioning of the pegs. You can build a perfect path through your Ballionaire board and the ball may never even stray near it — even if you place out bouncers, jump ropes and more to try and direct it. Similarly, you might tuck away a crystal ball, caterpillar or cactus so that you gain bonuses but the ball never touches them, but your next ball might catapult itself directly at them.
Ballionaire is (as I imagine watching team sports is) all about cheering when something you thought was going to happen happens, and arbitrarily blaming something and lamenting as luck, fate or whatever soured your plans strikes against you.
Its fantastic, its magnetic, and I’ve already lost far too long on the simple demo. That demo includes two of the final boards, as well as a pretty natty tutorial for three different combo trees — although maybe introduction is the better word as random boons and choices follow quickly and the second you release your first ball you’re off the rails.
I’m excited to see more of Ballionaire, and I’m especially interested to see the full width of the peg and boon options in the final game. Mastery isn’t attainable here, but the feelings that gush forth here when you do something incredibly cool, or when you do something incredibly stupid (like flicking the gravity for all your spawners) is something rare and special.
Ballionaire is expected to launch for PC and Linux in the near future (‘a LOT closer than you think‘).
