Peglin by developer Red Nexus Games Inc. and publisher BlitWorks—Microsoft Xbox Series X review written byNick with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Peglin is a fascinating blend of gaming elements that is surprisingly addicting, even if I do find myself enjoying it most in relatively short bursts. Sometimes when you mix game types, you wind up with diluted elements that don’t really shine, but that is not the case with Peglin. Careful consideration went into balancing this clever if somewhat repetitive game, creating a very unique gaming experience.
At first glance, Peglin looks a great deal like one of my favorite casual game titles of all time, Peggle. Both of these titles offer a pachinko style gameplay where you shoot a ball from the top of the screen and it descends down the board striking a variety of pegs along the way to earn points and unlock power-ups before reaching the bottom to end your turn. As someone who loves pinball and has played numerous pinball video games, there’s an addictive shared DNA in these types of games that simply appeals to me.
What Peglin does differently however, is add RPG and roguelike elements to the mix. At its core, you take out pegs to deal damage to enemies that will then in turn attempt to do damage to your character. There’s a sort of turn-based RPG cadence at play here, as you do damage with the ordinary pegs you hit, but there’s numerous other factors that can ramp up the damage you do to your opponents based on special pegs on the board or the type of ball you are shooting at them. Another RPG element is the money you earn along the way that allows you to buy new items and upgrades.
The roguelike elements come from the somewhat short and occasionally repetitive nature of the maps that have a Slay the Spire-like vibe to them. You enter a room that has battles, treasures or random events, which then branches off to a different room on the map, as you work your way down (as opposed to working up the map as you do in Slay the Spire), until you reach a boss battle that often has a slightly different set of gimmicks to figure out than your typical enemy encounters. Quite often you will lose along the way, but finding things unlocks other elements of the game that could show up in future runs, lending Peglin its roguelike feel.
If the above sound pretty fun, well… that’s because it is. I really enjoyed my runs in Peglin and likely will continue to fire it up for weeks or even months to come. There’s that strong sense of ‘just one more run’ that roguelikes are so good at fostering, though I do find myself sometimes only wanting to squeeze in one or two runs in a row before taking a break to play something else before coming back to Peglin again for another round. It’s addicting, but there are some frustrations that can surface with the gameplay, especially when you don’t take a breather.
For one, the RNG Gods reign supreme here. There is skill in your shots of course, trying to read the angles and create useful ricochets, but there are some elements of luck baked in here as well. Especially as the special pegs that bestow effects such as critical hits move about the board at random each turn, sometimes taking up residency in locations you simply can’t hope to strike. Also, your rewards and the types of upgrades you can purchase are quite randomized as well, and not all ball types are created equal. While I appreciate that there is a good variety in the ball types you can earn, as you unlock more it also means that you need to keep developing your strategies because your favorite combinations might not happen again for a while.
It is also worth noting that the way the game plays can be a bit redundant. The aforementioned random variety helps with this, but the peg patterns start to repeat more quickly than a game such as Peggle, and the stages themselves start to have a sort of sameness to them when you visit them for the tenth time or so. More environments, boss types, ball types and event types would certainly help on this front. Thankfully the variety of challenges and enemy types also helps to offset the feeling of repletion somewhat.
By and large the presentation holds up pretty well. The music is catchy, the visuals are a cute, pixelized style that won’t win any awards or stretch the limitations of your hardware, but it all feels thematically fitting. I will say one area that Peglin could have used a bit more love is in the tutorials / explanations of gameplay (or almost complete lack of). I realize a lot of roguelikes tend to skimp in these areas and let you learn lessons through gameplay, but the first couple of runs did feel somewhat needlessly confusing at times.
Peglin has an undeniable level of charm mixed with a variety of gameplay elements that make for an addicting game that blends genres skillfully. A bit more variety would have been nice, and your tolerance for luck may heavily influence your own experience with the game, but I have enjoyed several dozen runs with Peglin so far and imagine there will be dozens more in the near future.
Score: 7.5 / 10
