Join The Club
Game developers are burning through genres, high concepts, and even annoying machines that scammed you on the boardwalk as a child to fuel quick-hit Balatro-likes or Vampire Survivors-likes at the same rate the smartphone industry's sucking down rare earth minerals. I get why: compulsive play is core to the design, they can be made relatively fast and relatively cheap, and a day or two on the Steam charts (or a viral Twitch stream or YouTube video) can drive 100,000 sales at a time when just surviving to make another game feels like a real win.
But good lord are there a lot of them. 257 new roguelites have dropped on Steam in the last 30 days, according to SteamDB, and even discounting the shovelware there are too many to keep track of. There are the deckbuilders, the action games, the… Minesweeper-likes? That tag doesn't even cover games like Far Far West that prioritize weightier descriptions—FPS, online co-op, loot—perhaps because that combination of words carries an innate implication with it. Of course a co-op horde shooter with randomized loot is a roguelite. Duh.
I was ready to declare that I'm fully worn out on the format—that I hope we're nearing the bottom of the barrel for ideas that can be crammed like Play-Doh through the deckbuilder or Survivor mold—and then some jerk went and announced Pin-Crawl, "a dungeon crawling pinball rogue-lite."
Pinball is my kryptonite, or maybe more accurately the cheese you can bait a trap with to make me go all Monterey Jack. Is its pull diminished slightly by not being an actual, physical pinball machine? Sure! Nothing beats the real thing.
But in the same way that Balatrofying mahjong was a grave threat to my friend Baxter, the compulsive nature of crafting wildly multiplicative roguelite builds but with the trappings of pinball is like a lab-grown block of cheese bioengineered to my exact olfactory wavelength.
Pin-Crawl, which has a page on Steam but currently no release date, doesn't at a glance have the same pixel art and particle oomph as Xenotilt or Demon's Tilt, which are great (but more conventional) digital pinball tables. But Pin-Crawl has the roguelite twist, where upgrades start doing crazy shit like bombarding the screen with stars or triggering frenzied multiballs and "spells to give you a unique advantage against the dungeon's inhabitants." It has stats! Bosses! Meta progression, no doubt, that will make more exciting things happen the longer I play, even if I don't get any better at the actual pinball!
I want to say no thanks, I don't need any of that. But I can't. I do need it. I need it because I played Sonic Spinball as a child and haven't been entirely right since.
This is not the first game to put a twist of this sort on pinball: there's another one coming out this year, even. But more common, somehow, is the pinball metroidvania, which requires a bit more commitment and I think is a tougher sell. Pinball is better in short sessions, and metroidvanias need a bit more narrative pull to keep you engaged over the long term, a tricky marriage that in my experience only Yoku's Island Express has pulled off brilliantly.
Despite being a metroidvania, Yoku's Island Express is a breezy game, easy to polish off in a single weekend. I assume that whenever I play Pin-Crawl the weekend will instead evaporate, leaving me wondering where the hell 48 hours of my life just went—but at least I'll have one 3.6-billion point multiball combo to show for it.
