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A trend of gambling-inspired games has surfaced in the wake of poker-like deckbuilding roguelike Balatro. The recipe? Take a standard game of chance you might find in any casino and mash an uncountable number of bells and whistles and gizmos and weirdnesses into it, then slather it in a “one more turn” roguelike dressing, and make it as tactile and punchy as humanly possible. The ongoing Steam Next Fest has no shortage of these gambley gimmickers, but here’s one demo that stood out. Ballionaire is a colourful pachinko-inspired roguelike, but you choose where the wacky widgets will go.
It’s more straightforward than the chaos of that trailer makes out. You drop a ball from the top of the board and watch as it bounces its way down through the pins. You earn cash for each little bumper or bonkable doohickey the ball hits along the way. Some of these bumpers (called “triggers”) will have special features. An axe will chop your ball in half, allowing it to fall in multiple directions, activating even more gadgets. A teleporter will zap your ball back to the top of the board, letting it fall all over again. You can get different types of ball, designed after the classical elements, such as fire, water, and chicken egg (placing an egg carton somewhere will catch the eggs for passive, eggy income).
It only gets wackier as you go from level to level, seeking bigger payouts to appease the gods. You could install a little patch of cacti, which earn money when not bonked, and then try and keep the ball away from them by surrounding the plants with other bumpers. Or you could get culinary, putting a tomato, some bread, and a block of cheese in a neat little cluster, which your ball will collect as it bonks each. Placing a frying pan underneath that will combine all these into a meal for extra dollars, before a big open mouth at the bottom of the board can scoff everything up.
Try the demo. Go on. Steam Next Fest is almost over (it ends on Monday) and this is a frivilous and fun hour of ball bonking (ahem). It’s not the first time pachinko has served as inspiration for a video game, mind. Both Peggle and Peglin owe something to the poppy pinging of the traditional Japanese gambling machine.
As for the recent upswell of gambling-themed games, there’s reason to be thoughtful about this, and there are already enough questionable practices in the games industry when it comes to psychological tactics of free-to-play games and MMOs. But at least the developer of Balatro, for one, has considered such concerns, even writing into his will that the game should not be co-opted by the gambling industry.