Beware of Falling into Ball x Pit

By Garrett Martin | October 29, 2025 | 4:55pm

Video Games Features ball x pit

I’ve developed a new routine over the last couple of weeks. At the end of the day, when I’m done with work and chores and dinner, I put a record on, sit down in front of the TV, and play a game called Ball x Pit. I have done this almost every night for 11 straight days, and for one main reason: because I am the weakest human being I have ever known.

One doesn’t play Ball x Pit. One chucks hour after hour into that pit, hooked on mechanically addictive action that is otherwise unfulfilling in almost every possible way. There is no narrative weight here, only the slightest hint of strategy, and nothing intellectual, philosophical, or spiritual to hang on to. It’s just rote repetition, doing the same thing over and over, solely to watch numbers go up. In many ways it’s the purest, most perfect form of the roguelite: a game where you do the same two things ad infinitum simply for the vanishingly brief joy of incrementalism.

Here’s what those two things are. Ball x Pit is part ballbreaker and part scrolling shooter. Your character tosses balls up towards the top of a vertical lane; those balls do damage to enemies every time they hit one, bouncing off both enemies and the lane’s two walls, before disappearing off the bottom or top of the screen. If your character catches a ball on the rebound, they immediately throw it again; if a ball goes off the screen, there’s a short cooldown before it fires again. You can manually fire the balls, but it will do a number on your trigger button, so it’s best to turn on the autofire option. Unlike the bar at the bottom of Breakout or Arkanoid, your character can freely move up, down, and across most of the lane, and can aim its shots, like the machine gun man in Commando or Ikari Warriors. And in nods to shoot ‘em ups (or shmups), Ball x Pit scrolls automatically and incessantly, with its bosses having elaborate bullet patterns reminiscent of bullet hell shooters.

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That’s only one half of Ball x Pit’s two-fold structure, though. That action described above happens when you descend into the pit—it’s the run part of this roguelite. When you’re not on a run, you have a field you have to cultivate, planting crops and trees and mining rocks in order to construct a variety of buildings that will unlock or permanently upgrade your characters. To harvest, mine, or build, you have to send your characters out on manic, automatic runs across your territory; you aim them like you’re playing some old pool video game or Bust-a-Move, hit the fire button, and then watch as they careen across your fields, collecting resources and bouncing off buildings. You can do that basically once between runs, so you’ll constantly juggle the two: hit the pit and see if you can clear a level, then do a little farming and construction to improve your chances in the pit.

The issue here is that neither half requires much in the way of strategy or skill. The majority of this game is making sure you’re aiming at the right spot, and then hoping you’re lucky enough during a run to get the kind of power-ups you need to finish one (it takes about 15 minutes to make it through a complete run of any level, all of which have two minibosses and one final boss), or that you’ll gather enough resources during the harvest to erect whatever building you’re eyeing next. You don’t really need the reflexes or aim of pinball or shoot ‘em ups. And there are no puzzles to solve, no patterns to recognize—it’s just columns of the same enemies steadily marching towards you. Although the field of options you can unlock is very deep, every part of actually playing this game is simplistic and repetitive, and that is a major drag.

Compare Ball x Pit to two of its most obvious recent analogues. It doesn’t have anything close to the rich strategic complexity of Balatro, and its single, constantly scrolling lane doesn’t give you the freedom to explore or the sense of discovery found in Vampire Survivors. Ball x Pit sticks you in a tunnel and makes you march from point A to point B with little variation or room for experimentation, outside of the specific power-ups you can choose as you gain experience within a run—and even those aren’t as varied or deep as what you’ll find in other, similar games.

It leaves you with one single motivating factor: seeing the numbers go up. Not your “high score”—as a pinball, shmup, and classic arcade fan I have a profound appreciation for games whose primary goal is getting the highest number you can—but numbers like the amount of damage you do during a run, or the amount of seconds on the clock for each harvest. You’ll get wasted so quickly for so long that any sense of progress feels like a reward—and that’s the only rewarding thing about the game. And when you reach a certain point, hours and hours in, you unlock a regular ability that flattens that difficulty and turns most levels from a crapshoot into a cakewalk.

The perverse genius of that alternating structure is that it constantly keeps you playing. When you bomb out of a run you can immediately harvest again, which will often immediately raise your permanent stats, which will make you want to immediately start another run to see how much farther you can get this time. And suddenly it’s 3 a.m. and you’ve listened to the second side of the new Possible Humans LP five times in a row, and you know your wife will have questions in the morning.

Ball x Pit is deeply flawed, fatally hollow, and cynically designed to prey on players’ weaknesses. As somebody who is also deeply flawed and fatally hollow, my weakness is overpowering. I’m exactly the kind of easy mark Ball x Pit is designed for, and yeah, I couldn’t resist the plunge. More power to ‘em, I guess. But you don’t have to fall for it. You don’t have to jump headfirst into this pit. And if you do decide to, at least now you’ve been warned.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.