A lot of developers describe their games as “Vampire Survivors meets X,” but never follow through on their promise. Kenny Sun is not one of them, and in a few ways, his latest creation Ball x Pit is arguably better than BAFTA’s 2023 GOTY and delivers one of the most compelling and effortlessly playable titles of 2025.
Ball x Pit’s second influence is Breakout, offering a well-executed spin on the minimal-input formula. On the face of it, it’s a straightforward roguelike: endless enemies spawn in rows, and you destroy them with your balls. As you level up, you upgrade your weapons, add passive abilities, and build robust, varied strategies based on alchemy, your perceived strengths, and a bit of luck.
Its weird formula, which initially feels convoluted thanks to its weird world-building element away from the action, eventually comes together to the degree that Ball x Pit finds itself as a surprising frontrunner for indie game-of-the-year honors, even in the face of spectacular competition such as Blue Prince, Despelote, Öoo, Spilled!, and Abiotic Factor.
Spaceship x disaster
The Ball x Pit story is pretty straightforward: a utopia known as Ballbylon, which looks like a cross between Mont Saint-Michel and Oblivion’s Imperial City, gets bombed by a disco spaceship and results in a deep, circular hole in the ground. You, starting as a bog-standard warrior, are one of many treasure hunters who descend into it using a Fallout-esque scrap elevator to discover its riches.
Each of the game’s 12-to-15-minute stages is split into three sections, punctuated by two sub-bosses before culminating in a final Big Bad. Enemies have different strengths, abilities, and attacks, and any that reach the bottom of the screen will suicide dive your character and cause significant damage, meaning you need to watch your flanks, especially as the field widens gradually through each level.
You have four active slots for your main balls, and another four passive slots, and swirly pick-ups let you upgrade, fuse, and evolve your abilities to create ever more ridiculous and destructive powers. You collect gems from fallen enemies to level up, using these brief moments of respite to tinker with your weapons and passives (capped at three levels) or unlock new abilities, picking from 119 gradually unlocked options. It’s a heady mix of immediate requirements and long-term gains — moments of quiet contemplation that often punctuate some of the most frenetic battles where you’re fighting for your life.
Active x passive
The whole game is about balance: weighing up your direct attacks with more indiscriminate damage through wider-ranging abilities like earthquakes, lightning, or lasers. At first, Ball x Pit is quite forgiving, but never wasting an opportunity to teach you what works well with other things.
There’s a huge element of risk vs reward, especially in early stages of the game, as Ball x Pit encourages you to try new ideas, even if you don’t know what the outcome will be. Much like Vampire Survivors, you can just use things in tandem, but others have a true “evolution” path. Some are obvious, e.g. vertical and horizontal lasers, but loads are created from guesswork or simple hope.
If all else fails, and evolutions aren’t available, you can instead fuse a couple of balls together in a more hotch-potch way. You may risk creating a bastardized ball that nerfs previous effects, but at least it frees up another slot to try something else. Sometimes, you can create something so devastating that a boss is pounded into the dirt by just three or four shots, and you warily scan the end-of-level DPS report for future reference.
There’s a lottery element to upgrades — you can reroll for different options, at a gradually increased cost, paid for by gold you collect during each stage — but Ball x Pit tends to lean into existing passive abilities, and to a lesser extent main attack balls, to synergize with your character’s unique abilities and current loadout.
Hate x enjoy
At first, I couldn’t care less for the world-building elements of Ball x Pit. You start with a patch of land on which to farm, create homes to unlock new characters, and develop buildings for new abilities.
Initially, it feels like cute but unnecessarily complicated post-fight busy work. It lacks the immediate incentivization and simplicity found in the camp from Devolver’s stablemate (and 2022 indie GOTY) Cult of the Lamb; it doesn’t help that the only way to build and reap is to send your characters out like Breakout balls, giving you progress bars and items for everything they bounce off.
You constantly find yourself moving buildings to create safe, optimal bouncing strategies — most of the time, you’ll shape buildings into horseshoes to ensure you complete the two or three things you need the most. However, once you realize what these structures can unlock, like extra ability slots, or the ability to run two characters at once, those underlying problems are reduced to a low level. Ball x Pit will throw up a couple of levels that demand much more than just high character levels (I hit a major wall at stage 4), so you start to see your township as empowering, rather than a necessary evil.
Must x play
Ball x Pit will turn a few people away within the first few runs due to its unique but odd approach, effectively offering 1.5 games in a roguelike genre that tends to thrive with much simpler propositions.
Still, it does everything else brilliantly. Its art style is simple but evocative, bringing its weird enemies to life with a strong soundtrack, smooth visuals, simple iconography, and a subtle sense of humor. The balance of weaponry is a feat in itself — no ball or passive ability is inherently good or bad, and they constantly reward new ideas, especially in tandem with Ball x Pit’s cast of increasingly strange playable characters, who boast their own abilities, even if you’ll try half of them once and never bother again.
Sure, the storyline is essentially non-existent, and is probably the only thing that deserved a little more time, but for purists, Ball x Pit is unmissable. For everyone else, it’s a must-try experience.
