Whenever I complain about the random factor in a roguelike, especially the deck-builders, someone comes out of the woodwork to explain to me that I am mistaken and/or innately flawed as a person. I do not agree with the former perspective. This sort of game always involves, to some degree, the luck of the draw. The great ones give you ways to build around, ignore, or worth within that; the mediocre ones turn into a coin-flipping simulator.
In Ballionaire, the luck of the draw is the entire point. Ballionaire is to pachinko what Slay the Spire is to collectible card games, but with a physics-based element that has a knack for screwing you over. It’s more of a raw gamble than most games in this vein, where your best possible plan can sometimes be blown to hell through no fault of your own.
In something that appears to be an MLM, a cult, or possibly both, you’re a lowly “nillionaire” who’s out to learn how to earn from the Keepers. That means playing their elaborate game to earn as much money as possible within a set number of ball drops. With each success, you graduate to the next level of “tribute,” but if you fail to meet the Keepers’ demands, you have to start from scratch.
Between each drop, you randomly draft a series of 3 or more pins for your board, which you use to set up a gauntlet of high-scoring bumpers, traps, and obstacles for your next ball. The early rounds are easy, but as you progress, you’ll need to pay attention to setups and synergies to satisfy the Keepers’ requests.
Initially, Ballionaire is a riot of colors, sounds, strange sights, and new terminology, but it’s easy to pick up most of it over the course of your first game on the simplest board. Early on, you can set up obvious tricks on the board like pinball bumpers, to keep your ball in play for another couple of crucial seconds, but the further you get into the game, the more elaborate your options become.
This can include planting a field of vegetables in the middle of the board so your ball will collect them on the way through, then hit a Chef’s Pan that will transform the vegetables into a Pizza that you can pick up for a big score multiplier. You could also go all in on elementally-aligned balls and pins that work with them, so your water balls force Pumpkins to grow until they’re worth thousands on each hit. Another style of pin eats your original ball to spit out coins, which can either be used as a simple multiball or get fed into a piggy bank for reliable per-drop income.
Like other roguelikes, it’s a question of what you can set up on the fly with what you’re given, and what you can do to tilt the odds in your favor. It’s easy to accidentally set up negative synergies in Ballionaire, and while you’ve got a limited number of removals with which to eliminate inconvenient pins, you also get passive abilities (“Boons”) that you can’t get rid of.
It’s the sort of thing that makes my brain itch. Ballionaire couples the feel of a Vegas slot machine with the just-one-more buzz of this sort of short-run roguelike. It’s two addictive tastes that compound one another, as told through bizarre graphics that look like an Adult Swim show based on ‘90s skater art. The higher your values go, the bigger the numbers get, until the lower half of your screen explodes into financial fireworks.
My primary issue with Ballionaire is that it’s still essentially a slot machine. The one thing that you cannot influence about it to any significant degree, at least not with anything I’ve unlocked to date, is the initial ball drop and its ensuing spin. I’ve lost entire runs because my last ball decided on a whim to take a magnificent suicide dive straight off the edge of the board, or threaded a very careful needle between every single bumper and barrier I’d set up. There’s an actively malevolent element to Ballionaire’s physics that holds it back.
You can unlock additional toys and tools by playing Ballionaire, but you do so via a gacha system that involves earning prize tickets for an in-game vending machine. Some of the unlocks are legitimate upgrades, but it’s a gamble in a gamble in a gamble; you might win them, then you might get them, and then they might not show up in a run where they can be used properly.
Ballionaire still has some legs, and it’s a great game to throw on your Steam Deck, but I couldn’t recommend it without a disclaimer. Even more than other roguelikes, it’s a game about trying to minimize the influence of pure luck, and every once in a while, it’ll decide to doom you for no particular reason. There are some good ideas and solid design here, as well as a particularly evocative metaphor for modern capitalism, but Ballionaire has a knack for sudden failure that holds it back.
[Ballionaire, by developer Newobject and publisher Raw Fury, is available now on Steam for $12.34. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a Raw Fury PR representative.]
