Game developers are burning through genres, high concepts, and even annoying arcade machines that scammed you on the boardwalk as a child to fuel quick-hit Balatro-likes or Vampire Survivors-likes. They are doing this at the same rate the smartphone industry sucks down rare earth minerals.
I get why: compulsive play is core to the design. These games can be made relatively fast and cheap, and a day or two on the Steam charts—or a viral Twitch stream—can drive 100,000 sales. This is a real win in an era where just surviving to make another game feels like a victory.
But good lord, are there a lot of them. According to SteamDB, 257 new roguelites dropped on Steam in the last 30 days. Even discounting the shovelware, there are too many to keep track of. We have deckbuilders, action games, and even Minesweeper-likes.
The Pinball Trap
Perhaps this bite-sized style of repetitive play, with its soothing metaprogression, is what our fractured psyches are best suited to right now. They are the game equivalent of doomscrolling without looking up for four straight hours. Most of that time is wasted on glazed-over, unblinking eyes, except for that one really funny video that sticks in your mind—the game equivalent of a truly sick Balatro hand.
At least we are playing "gambling" games instead of pouring the last dregs of our inflation-ravaged checking accounts into prediction markets, right?
I was ready to declare that I was fully worn out on the format. I hoped we were nearing the bottom of the barrel for ideas that could be crammed like Play-Doh through the deckbuilder or Survivor mold.
Then some jerk went and announced Pin-Crawl, described as "a dungeon crawling pinball rogue-lite."
Ah damn. Ah hell.
As translator Stephen Meyerink posted on Bluesky where I first saw the game: "I'm in danger. You're killing me here, Eddy."
Pinball is my kryptonite. Or, more accurately, it is 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 with the trappings of pinball is like a lab-grown block of cheese bioengineered to my exact olfactory wavelength.
Why Pin-Crawl Hooks Me
Pin-Crawl has a page on Steam but currently has no release date. At a glance, it doesn’t have the same pixel art and particle oomph as Xenotilt or Demon's Tilt, which are great but more conventional digital pinball tables.
However, Pin-Crawl has the roguelite twist that hooks me:
- Upgrades start doing crazy shit, like bombarding the screen with stars or triggering frenzied multiballs.
- Spells give you a unique advantage against the dungeon's inhabitants.
- Stats and Bosses provide a structure that demands engagement.
There is 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. So romantic. So romantic. So romantic.
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.
The Pinball vs. Metroidvania Debate
This is not the first game to put a twist of this sort on pinball; there is another one coming out this year. However, more common is the pinball metroidvania, which requires a bit more commitment and is a tougher sell.
Pinball is better in short sessions. Metroidvanias need more narrative pull to keep you engaged over the long term. It is a tricky marriage that, in my experience, only Yoku’s Island Express has pulled off brilliantly.
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. I will be left 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.
