HIGH An extremely satisfying gameplay loop.

LOW It’s not very obvious on how to “win” a run.

WTF Body horror… in my roguelite?

We’ve done it, folks. We’ve made a slot-machine roguelite. I think we can pack it up for the rest of time because we’ve made the single most addicting videogame known to man.

In all honesty, CloverPit somehow works as a videogame on a level that I didn’t know was possible. Instead of sticking to a source material’s roots and then adding endless customization like poker in Balatro, or weaving in story to build a larger world as seen in Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, CloverPit takes slot machines in a more horrifying direction.

Here, the player is trapped in the “CloverPit,” a 5×5 box of a room with a slot machine, a coin depository, an item shop, and not much else. It’s here where the player must play a slot machine and deposit enough coins by each deadline, or else risk the floor opening up and falling to their death. There are ways to rig the machine and items to save the player in times of distress, but ultimately, they’re at the mercy of Lady Luck.

So much of what makes a videogame great is atmosphere, but atmosphere isn’t limited to just music or the art direction. It’s ultimately a collection of small choices that make the experience enjoyable or memorable — sound effects, lighting, and small programming quirks. 

CloverPit has all of these and more. It’s filled with a kind of alchemy that I can barely explain in words, but it has that special sauce where every mechanic is designed to to keep people playing for as long as they can. Each set of spins sounds off with a garbled, electronic announcer saying “Let’s go gambling!” followed by satisfying sounds whenever the machine scores a pattern, and dissatisfying ones whenever they come up short. 

…But the horror is where CloverPit starts to get interesting.

See, the player is “promised” a way out of the pit if they score enough points on the slot machine – but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Each time they pass a scoring threshold, they’re forced to play again but just reach a higher point total. Eventually, they’re asked to get enough points to unlock a key that seems like a way out, but…

These evil undertones are even more exaggerated by CloverPit‘s dark, hard polygonal art style – which actually did make me feel like I was trapped in a pit with no escape. I felt compelled to play the slots, not just to beat the game, but to get the hell out of the pit. 

Unlike similar roguelites such as Balatro, it’s not obvious how to build a winning run in CloverPit. A slot machine seems like the most luck-of-the-draw machine out there, but CloverPit teaches the player how to win through various trials by fire. Since each round is a gamble, the player had better capitalize on every opportunity by knowing what they want to get out of it.

Each round starts with a choice — spin three times and get two tickets to buy items, or spin seven times and only get one ticket. Rounds pass with more and more choices, where players need to balance keeping enough coins to pass a deadline against buying items that will ultimately increase that coin total. Sometimes a spin will produce enough coins to pass a deadline early, granting the player an extra bonus of coins and tickets to splurge in the item shop. Yet maybe passing that deadline early isn’t the best idea – maybe they want to keep spinning in order to to bank coins for future rounds if they find their winning strategy is petering out. 

This decision-making in CloverPit feels also more weighty than other roguelikes because of the chances that I would be stopped in my tracks due to bad luck. Many runs become dead-on-arrival if the player doesn’t get items that either increase the score from each successful spin, or items that rig the slot machine to make certain symbols appear more often — and don’t forget about the chance to spin a 666, which causes the player to lose all money earned in that round! 

…But when I put things together correctly, avoided the 666 and I did win – ooh boy, that was the best feeling ever.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what the slot machine has to offer in terms of winning strategies or clever tricks, as there are countless items to unlock, game modifiers to equip, and just more to play. In a decade where certain titles toe the line between gambling and games, CloverPit performs that dance beautifully and produces an unforgettable roguelite experience as a result — it’s a delight, and one of the most delightfully frustrating things I’ve played this year. 

Score: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Panik Arcade and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is rated T for Teen on the ESRB. The game does have a small amount of gore and blood. Players must equip bloody human bones to get past certain portions of the game and there is blood lining the shelves within the cell the main character is trapped in.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game’s story is text-only but the subtitles cannot be resized. The game is not fully accessible. There are no audio cues needed for successful play.\

Remappable Controls: CloverPit is mouse and keyboard only, and there are a few different layouts for keyboards included beyond QWERTY. There are no remap options besides those.

The post CloverPit Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The dopamine rush of a good drop.

LOW Sometimes build ideas are non-starters.

WTF The ball explodes into blood when it hits a cactus?

Like some interstellar blob monster from a late-nite low-budget ’50s creature feature, the roguelite
genre shambles forward, growing larger and larger, assimilating more and more genres, concepts, and
real-world bric-a-brac into its imposing gelatinous mass….. and now, Ballionaire.

This new title is (probably) the second-ever pachinko-themed roguelite — the first being the sadly-on-hiatus Plinko Panic. And no, neither Peglin nor Roundguard are pachinko roguelites, no matter what they tell you. Both are clearly derived from Peggle, which is certainly pachinko-esque but differs from the classic mechanical game in that it allows players to aim the ball. With the semi-exception of a pinball-themed board, Ballionaire players can only hit the drop button and watch the ball go.

Nomenclatural cheeseparing aside, the structure of Ballionaire will be familiar to anybody who has
played any banner roguelite release from the last five years. Each run consists of nine rounds – each round consists of a number of ball drops, and players must make a certain amount of money in each round to proceed to the next — it’s the same basic “Make Rent” format of Luck Be a Landlord, which is proving to be as widespread and influential in terms of roguelite structure as Slay the Spire’s node map has been.

Runs can be played on one of five boards, each with their own theme and gimmicks. Between the de
facto pachinko pins, there are slots to put ‘triggers,’ which are objects that do many different things but, in a general sense, activate when they are hit by the ball.

There are more than a hundred of these things and, ommetaphobes be warned, nearly all of them have eyes. The Jump Rope trigger? Eyes on the handles. Cave trigger? Eyes in the cave. The Cheese? It’s got eyes in the cheese holes. They could’ve called this game Eyellionaire.

Once the basics are under the belt, every board becomes a buffet of broken builds, and even on the hardest difficulty, this is rarely a roguelite in which the finish line is just barely crawled over. By the latter rounds, each drop sets off a neon-colored pandemonium – a glorious, polyphonic, integer extravaganza with triggers popping off, extra balls dropping in, and counters and multipliers and numbers going up, up, up. The part of the brain that likes to solve and optimize gets lit up like a cathode tube.

It’s not the deepest roguelite around – although anybody who clicks with it has dozens of
happy hours ahead of them – and that’s before taking into account the possibility of additional content in the future, which the developer has already more or less confirmed is going to happen.

However, any future DLC aside, let’s take a moment to applaud a roguelite that doesn’t want to be a forever game. Endless replayability is, in fact, overvalued and fetishized, in both roguelites and other genres. There’s a widespread conviction that all games should engage all players for all time, and that’s nuts. And really, it’s not that Ballionaire can’t be played for a long, long time, just that it doesn’t take more than 10 or 12 hours to see most of what it has to offer, and to feel like a full experience has been
had.

Players will not still be unlocking new items dozens of hours in, and all of the boards are available to play right at the beginning. The experience at hour 50 might be more complex, but it won’t be that different — or that much less restricted — than the experience at hour 10. It’s only by extreme, unrealistic modern length expectations that Ballionaire might disappoint some people, but the reality is that it should be – and is – okay to have a great experience with a game and then move on.

I guess one could make a pachinko game with dark, mature theming, but the zany aesthetic here is much more germane to the concept of dropping balls into a giant toy. Everything is particolored and goofy, with an art style that somehow has skirted the Adventure Time event horizon that every other cartoon-inspired game finds itself mired in. It’s Nice to look at! The music is like candy too, and one of the primary sound effects in the menus is (what to my ear sounds like) a balloon tightening as it fills with helium? Whatever it is, I like it, and I like the ball-on-peg ‘bonk’ sound. In the late rounds, Ballionaire is a candybag cacophony of explosions, rumbles of thunder, splashes, growls, gawps, and every type of ‘boing’!

(Side note: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the stick man. There’s a lanky stick man on the splash screen who is constantly dancing. When the game is booted up, this guy is just boppin’. Dude is ready to play some Ballionaire. Nobody on earth could love this game like the stick man loves it. When players lose a round, he falls to his knees and then bonelessly to the ground. This guy is cool. This guy has star power. This guy? He’s a Gamer. Need the lore on him ASAP.)

For as frustrated as I am with the incessant flow of roguelites sometimes, I still very much
enjoy them when they’re done right, and the concept here justifies the format. Ballionaire earns its modest asking price many times over. It’s not earth shattering or genre-defining – it’s just amiable brain nourishment, on demand, any time, and as effortlessly enjoyable as a piece of chocolate or an ice cream cone. Thoroughly recommended!

7.5 out of 10

– Ben Schwartz

Disclosures: This game is developed by newobject and published by Raw Fury. It is available on PC.
This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the
game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. Most of the action involves a ball bouncing around a
brightly colored board, but there is actually an occasional blood splatter effect when certain triggers are
struck. Some of the character designs are ever-so-slightly macabre, but it’s all done with a very light
touch. No foul language or anything like that.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be resized. Once the ball is dropped there is no player input, but many audio cues sound off as specific triggers are hit and other things happen. All of these are accompanied by visual indications, although they are perhaps not as instantly understandable as the sound cues. That being said, there is also a “Drop history” tab that shows every interaction, in order, that happens on a particular drop. It’s worth noting that while it can be handy, I did not think it was necessary to have that level of granularity, even playing with the sound off.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Ballionaire can be played with either keyboard/mouse or a controller. With KB+M setup, the mouse can be used for everything, and is required for some actions, most notably selecting and placing triggers. Menus can be navigated with the arrow keys, options can be toggled with Enter, and during gameplay the ball can be dropped with the space bar. With a controller, the L stick is used to navigate the mouse cursor in the menus, while the face buttons are used to drop the ball (A), Reroll (Y), go back (B), or use a trigger remove (X). When in the trigger selection menu in between drops, the RT hides the menu so the board can be viewed, and the Y button can be used to expect any trigger already on the board.

The post Ballionaire Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.