Ball X Pit (2025)
In the course of the last 4 days, I have dumped over 25 hours into the latest indie craze Ball X Pit. My eyesight became glazed over with Tetris-Vision. Exploding balls, succubus specials and poisoned sandstorms are just the tip of why this run-based shooter takes several genres and blends them together into an extremely addictive experience that brings up that classic phrase “just one more run”.
Made by the insanely talented Kenny Sun and friends, Ball X Pit is a mashup of a few different genres, combining overhead auto scrollers like Dino Rikki and Gun.Smoke with bullet hell shooters, and then sprinkles in some run based permadeath gameplay. It seems like all too much at once, but it’s a perfectly balanced portion that helps make this game flow so well. There is enough to do that once a particular part got me feeling a bit exhausted, I was able to focus on another aspect like city building or upgrading.
At its core, the main premise is an auto scrolling top down shooter, but the ball upgrades keep the entire 15 minute run fresh. The enemy variation while basic with its boxed in art design seem non-threatening at first. However these packaged baddies pack a wallop that quickly becomes overwhelming as early as the second stage. Once I stopped banging my head against a task I clearly wasn’t ready for, I started learning the city building and harvesting section, that really helped me understand the full gameplay loop.
The overhead hub world keeps things moving long at a brisk pace since there is only so much that can be done in a single go. I felt a similar feeling of Animal Crossing with its focus on only being able to do a couple tasks before being blocked by upgrades or money constraints. Land needs to be purchased and expanded, which then can be for buildings to upgrade, or resource gathering such as farms and forests. I tried to partition out the land to create nice sections, but the land quickly became too expensive. It required some very tight packing of buildings and farmland, which is where my Tetris skills became imperative.
It took some time to learn how the gameplay loop was designed. I initially struggled with jumping between the overhead ball shooting levels, and then into a city builder with resource management. It isn't inherently easy to understand. Once I spent some time reading the descriptions and planning out my city’s overall market and living spaces, the farming aspect really was intuitive. I loved harvesting crops to gain upgrade materials, It provides a nice respite and adds to the Adaptive Run Survivor genre.
The ball shooter sections did take quite a bit of finessing early on and I ended up dying quite a few times due to some poorly chosen upgrades. But that learning was part of the fun and I thoroughly enjoyed trying out new runs of upgrading different items. Allowing each new item to be upgraded along with fusions and evolutions actually created some insane screen killing combos. And having a whole secondary set of passive items just furthered the creative possibilities.
The characters also provide a whole different set of opportunities for the levels to feel varied and different. I not only loved the art style and design of each character, but how they brought a very unique playstyle to the game’s levels. A mid-game upgrade allowing two characters to team together unlocked an entirely new set of combinations to make the game turn into utter chaos in the best way possible.
The levels all have very unique settings and locales. I loved jumping from the snowy cold frozen tundra level, with enemies that had ice shields around them on either side or in the front, which kept me changing my pointer’s location. At the end, each boss fits the theming, and an added touch of love needs to go out to the level progression meter. It shows how far along in the level the characters are, and each miniboss. Once at the top, and the boss is reached, it changes ever so slightly to the boss’ life meter.
Each Bosses felt fun and balanced. Something I’ve talked about quite a bit lately, and this is exactly where Ball X Pit changes up the over used phases. While there are certain attack patterns and phases to the bosses, it becomes more about maneuverability, learning when to strike and risk vs reward. It comes close to being dodge and attack like in the Dark Souls games, it also has multiple enemy spawns and having to deal with so many different obstacles, but always feels fair and challenging.
My attention was held the entire time, until the very end, where I decided to 100% the game, and had to grind out the money. If I either focused more on city management or went outside the game and looked up an optimized city guide, I’m sure I could have gotten that money much quicker. I prefer to organically play a game instead of looking up any guides, unless I’m ultimately stuck, and with the game being just a couple days old, those various suggestions are harder to come by.
It’s extremely rare for a game to captivate my attention like Ball X Pit did, and even more exceedingly rare for it to be from an indie game. But with the slew of this year’s titles showing more promise than anything big budget developers can in the AAA space, this easily is the year that turns the tables on where gamers go for games. I can’t wait to see what the next title from this developer becomes, I’m all in at this point.