I am convinced that I can get better at playing Ball X Pit, but whether I win or lose often seems to have little connection to my actual moment-to-moment skill. Sure, I can be smarter about my upgrade picks. I can aim and maneuver to maximize my DPS and avoid some attacks. But in the aggregate, my success feels more or less predetermined by an invisible curve that’s slowly progressing me through the metagame.
“I think there is a bit of a skill curve, but I do think it plateaus pretty quickly,” lead developer Kenny Sun told Game File this week. “Once you get it, there’s not much you can do to improve your play. So, it is very much a game about pretending that you’re getting better by getting better stats, actually.”
Rarely has a developer so perfectly articulated my ambiguous and conflicted feelings about their game!
Look, Ball X Pit is great. The smart mashup of Breakout and Vampire Survivors is way more than just a cash-in on one of Steam’s hottest genres. It’s part shoot ’em up, part buildcrafting roguelike, and part management sim. And it’s not just nice to look at and listen to while you’re watching the numbers go up. There are new levels to reach with unique hazards and tons of characters to unlock that subvert the core ball-throwing mechanic in interesting ways.
But still, I have a hard time not feeling slightly tricked and manipulated as I play, even if after each break I eventually come back for more. It’s the same way I felt about Vampire Survivors, and later Balatro, and most recently Slots & Daggers. Sun said this is partly by design.
“I kind of like the idea of having it start off as one thing and then slowly evolve into an idle game,” he told Game File. “Like, the more you play, the less you play.” He continued, “That’s something that one of my artists was talking about: He had this idea about how games were kind of turning into a thing where players just want to play less of the game. Like, Vampire Survivors is all about not playing the game.”
In other words, the more I play, the more I’m actually not playing, which makes me want to play even more. This is nothing completely new. You can sense the dark DNA of Diablo in each of these recent RNG-driven skinner boxes. But they are getting so much more streamlined and optimized.
Maybe that’s some small part of why Sun seems somewhat reluctant about Ball X Pit‘s wild success.
It sold 400,000 copies in its first week. That number has almost doubled in the weeks since. “It just feels weird for so many people to like this game,” he told Bloomberg in a separate interview. “I think the response has been a bit too positive. I think, like, there are plenty of flaws…I think the good things are good enough that it makes people ignore the flaws.”
Whatever those flaws are, they haven’t dented the roguelike’s 96-percent positive user rating on Steam. No wonder my inbox is flooded with new indie games pitching themselves as “Vampire Survivors meets X” or “Balatro crossed with Y.” Unfortunately, I don’t think most of them will be cleverly designed as Ball X Pit, let alone as successful.
