How I Found Myself in the Ball Pit
Embracing my dad era
At the end of 2025 I made a resolution to write down my thoughts about any games I roll credits on, movies or shows I watch, albums I listen to, books I read, or new creative gear I bought like lenses or cameras. So to kick things off I just rolled credits on Ball X Pit. Developed by Kenny Sun and Friends and published by Devolver Digital in October 2025 for basically every platform under the sun, Ball X Pit is kind of a roguelike, but it's also kind of a city builder if it were Tetris, but it's also a shmup... and I mean shmup like the early 90s arcade games that frequently had you piloting fighter jets or space ships to fight a vertically scrolling field if bullet hell insanity.
The Basics of Ball X Pit
Ball X Pit takes so many interesting and distinct gameplay concepts and slaps them together with it's own spin on everything. The result is sublime. The premise is simple, a meteor has destroyed the city of Ballbylon, leaving a gaping pit in it's wake. You descend the pit on a rickety elevator platform, with each level being a new layer of bullet hell madness. They're essentially distinct biomes with their own enemy variants and bosses. As you'd expect, each level is progressively hard and the developers did a fantastic job of scaling the difficulty as you clear levels and unlock new items.
Between runs of each level, Ball X Pit has you crafting a town with various buildings that represent perks and upgrades like stat buffs. The buildings are essentially tetris pieces you have to figure out an optimal layout for and constantly re-arrange as you unlock new upgrades. There's also some resource farming and management since all of the buildings and their upgrades have certain costs.
As you can imagine, the town building in Ball X Pit is a whole beast unto itself and there's all sorts of optimizations players have come up with and shared to maximize the resources you earn and all the various buffs. But to be honest, the town building aspect of Ball X Pit felt more like an inconvenience than a fun addition. I wanted to just unlock my upgrades and get right back to the pit. Instead, between almost every run, I'd have to build or upgrade something, tend to my resources, or re-arrange the layout to make room for new buildings I just unlocked. It's a cool system for managing your upgrades that makes it genuinely interactive and certainly scratches that sim city itch to an extent. But it just felt like a distraction from the real gameplay.
Meat and Potatoes
Like many shmups before it, Ball X Pit pits you against a vertically scrolling field of enemies that march towards you. You fight back by shooting, well... balls. You can do this manually but once I realized there was an auto-fire toggle, I basically never disabled it. All the various characters and character combinations you can pick alter how the balls you shoot behave and it gets shockingly novel with some of the characters turning the entire game into a turn based experience or even making the gameplay autonomous with the characters handling all the gameplay for you. Granted, they're not exactly tactical savants and I don't think I cleared a single level like this. But the fact the game has characters that literally play it for you is insane and I love it.
To keep it brief, the core gameplay is a pretty typical rouge-like meets survivors-like experience where damaging enemies drops XP gems you collect to progressively level up your characters throughout the course of a run with new items and item level upgrades. These cover two categories, balls and passives. The balls do all sorts of cool stuff like catch enemies on fire, split on impact, chain lighting attacks, lasers, and more. Once you've leveled up a ball or passive to level three, you can combine them with pre-defined synergies. Combining the flash and lighting balls for instance creates a new ball that damages all enemies on screen every time it hits. While I would have liked to see more synergies and maybe more creative or outlandish ones, I never got bored of that classic rogue-like process of slowly piecing together powerful builds from the random selections present with each XP level. Ball X Pit is also very generous with re-rolls so the build you were hoping for is rarely undone by a single bad roll.
When you boil it down though, the gameplay is really all about angles. Shooting balls so they bounce back and forth between the walls an enemies like a pinball machine on lightspeed crack cocaine is maybe one of the single most satisfying experiences I've had in a game all year (look I had to put a dad joke in because well, that's what this review is really about, but we'll get there in a minute) Ball X Pit is one of those games where every run starts a little slow with some busy work or tedium, then slowly morphs into a heart-pounding experience that keeps you on the edge of your seat as you finally craft a nearly perfect run and finally overcome the boss you just died to 5 times in a row. I had my moments with Ball X Pit where it felt like I was throwing myself at task I didn't full grasp. But eventually everything clicked into place and I discovered new builds and synergies that helped me across the finish line. I wouldn't say it's as addicting as some other rogue-likes or survivor-likes, but if you really like bouncing balls, few other games achieved such a sublime level of perfection as Ball X Pit.
Now for the whole "this game was life changing, but not for the reasons you think" bit of the post.
Discovering A New Chapter of My Life
Last year my wife and I were delighted to have our second kid. I'm not going to get into specifics because I want to respect their inherent right to privacy, but our first is still quite young, so our lives have basically been bouncing between caring for our newborn and our first kiddo, with little downtime for ourselves. The little we do have is spent, well, trying to do nothing. But late in 2025 a friend of mine offered to sell me his Steam Deck for a great price and I obliged. When I say the Steam Deck has totally changed gaming for me, I mean it.
For most of my childhood, I was a console gamer. I grew up with the SNES, then the Sega Genesis, then a PS1 and a PS2. When I moved out on my own I bought an Xbox 360 and that was basically the last console I owned. I've been exclusively a PC gamer since then and while it's by far my preferred way to play games for a litany of reasons I'll eventually cover in a future post, the point is that PC gaming is inherently a fixed hobby. You are stuck at your desk if you want to game. When I was a kid, console gaming was inherently a social experience because I was a kid and had to share the TV with my family or play on the rinky dink 13 inch CRT in my bedroom. While games these days are finally bringing back social gaming experiences with stuff like proximity chat and emergent PVPVE game modes, PC gaming can feel very isolating. Almost like a burden more than a fun activity.
In fairness, there are amazing technologies like Steam Link that lets you stream your games to devices like TVs and Phones. And when I say amazing, I mean I have a 10GBE LAN and there's basically zero lag or encoding artifacts when I use Steam Link. But still, my PC has to be on and the phone experience playing via WiFi isn't nearly as seamless. So if wanted to game in a more family friendly way than my typical late night gaming sessions alone in my office, it meant booting up a couch co-op game with my kid or playing a game that's fun to watching being played so my wife has a good time too. In other words, until I got the Steam Deck, I couldn't play the games I necessarily wanted to play in the moment without it cutting into the time I spend with my family or forcing myself to stay up late to play.
But now, I can sit in bed and talk to my wife before she goes to sleep while descending the Ball Pit. Heck, I can even stay up late in bed while playing without disturbing her. Physical connection in the modern age feels rarer than ever. In some ways, I let my PC gaming hobby act like another family member I further subdivided my time with from my actual family members.
When I first got the Steam Deck, I saw it as a means to expand my PC gaming hobby. But now that I've been using it for a few weeks and rolled credits on Ball X Pit, I realize it's condensed my PC gaming hobby and turned it into something that's easier to share with my family.
It's also let me enjoy more casual games like Jusant and Jotunnslayer that I would typically feel compelled to ignore on my PC that has an RTX 5080 in it and can run Battlefield 6 and ARC raiders at insane settings and FPS. Not having the allure of high end PC titles constantly nagging at me when I'm picking what to play has helped broaden the games I play. To be fair, I've always played a wide variety of games. I'm even an avid VR and mobile gamer. Balatro literally took over my phone's screentime metrics for MONTHS. It's not that I'm opposed to casual games or anything. It's that the Steam Deck is uniquely tuned to be the perfect devices for more casual games that are built with controllers in mind. And also Hades 2 because I cannot put that game down at times...
All that is to say that Ball X Pit is the first game I've finished this year and I played it from start to credits entirely on my Steam Deck. It's going to hold a special place in my gaming hobby as the game that brought back the casual, social, and leisure aspects of this whole thing we do. It's been so fucking long since I kicked my feet up on the couch after breakfast on a Saturday and just played some games surrounded by my family as they engage in their hobbies, which is typically our firstborn asking for my help with some particularly well connected LEGO.
Soundtrack
One of my personal favorite tracks from Ball X Pit's soundtrack created by Amos Roddy
Oh, and of course the Soundtrack for Ball X Pit is incredible. Amos Roddy did a phenomenal job giving every level of the pit a unique theme and vibe. The boss themes are all engaging and really hype up their respective fights. The soundtrack for the game might not garner the same prestige as say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Skate Story, but it elevates Ball X Pit to another level of near perfection.
This Isn't The Review You're Looking For
In case it wasn't obvious, this isn't a game review site so I'm not going to sit here and infantilize you with some reductive review score that belittles the game by reducing it to a subjective numeric value. I'm also not here to say that you too will have a life changing experience in part because of Ball X Pit like I did. But I will say it's an excellent game that you should probably check out on your platform of choice. I think it does a deceptively brilliant job of reviving the classic Arcade shmup genre for modern audiences by making the gameplay more accessible and leaning into rogue-like elements with a proven track record in other games. Ball X Pit is yet another one of those "specific gameplay element from another game, but with a new twist" like Balatro or Vampire Survivors. It might not be the most intellectually juicy game ever that inspires deeply personal and philosophical introspection about the meaning of life like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did for me, but it's a great game to start 2026 and this blog project off with.
Thank You
Now I'll get into this stuff more in a future post, but I'm a huge advocate for avoiding corporate platforms and self hosting your content as much as possible. But it's hard to acknowledge the built in benefits of being on a platform like Patreon that's accessible to the masses. So if it's easier for you to follow me on Patreon, follow this link to jump to this post's Patreon version and maybe even leave a comment there to tell me what you think?
Unlike a lot of people with Patreon pages, I'm not asking for your money. All of my content is free. Patreon is just where I'll be centralizing all the stuff like this in a way that people can easily interact with via comments and other social tools. I built this website myself, so the idea of adding comments and managing user accounts was just a nightmare I didn't want to invite into my evening routine. Obviously there will be an option to give me your money on Patreon if you really want to, but I won't be pay-walling anything worth looking at.
Thank you for reading and good luck in the Ball Pit.