A layered cocktail that needs some shaking and stirring of its components.

The process of learning a new roguelite is one that, with enough experience, boils down to determining what works with what. This goes doubly for an engine-builder where the composition of the engine is just as important as its execution. Your Isaacs and Gungeons can be finished with poor items and pure skill, but when constructing a deck the parts need to work in harmony.

Peglin wants to have it both ways with its appropriation of Peggle's adaptation of pachinko machines. Whereas Peggle largely removed the element of luck in all but name (the Zen Ball making it most apparent that this is a game of skill), Peglin has done away with the possibility of winning with skill. Everything is down to RNG in one way or another, and the worst part is that Peglin refuses to admit this to the player. In this sense, Peglin is no different from its pachinko machine grandfather, the specific tuning of the latter's pins betraying the simple proposition of getting a ball to its goal.

The crux of the issue is that the player has no way of changing their odds in a meaningful way. Like other engine-builders, you are presented a few random choices for what passive items or balls you want to take. After battle you can upgrade your orbs if you wish. While other engine-builder roguelites like Slay the Spire and Monster Train offer the choice of card for free, Peglin assigns a cost to this and grants shockingly few opportunities to remove balls from the deck. Each shop does let you remove one ball for a fee, but you're going to have to bounce your way over there and thus structure your play in service of those spare few chances.

Building an engine is itself troublesome due to the nature of play. For starters, balls can have their own gravity which is further affected by bouncy pegs, bombs, gravity wells, slime bubbles, and other hazards. On top of this, the ball does not necessarily go to where the pointer is -- Peggle's balls always went straight to the pointer. Coupled with a paltry shot preview, each shot is a skewed gamble, a vague gesture of intent that is rarely realised. The game's confusion status which rapidly rotates your aim might as well be on by default, the end result is nearly identical. Even ignoring the inefficacy of aiming, without a way to meaningfully affect your luck, you can end up with a build that shoots itself in the foot. Whether due to my own (un)luck of the game's internal weighting, nearly every run of mine has been focused on increasing non-critical damage to ludicrous levels. That feels fun, but it is made instantly worthless if my ball hits a crit modifier, my damage cut down tenfold if not more. With a proper ability to aim my shots that would be fine, I would simply aim away from my Achilles' heel, but a refreshing of the board, an errant moving peg, a black hole, any number of possibilities will ensure my ball is heading straight for the one thing I don't want to have happen. That does not feel like I played poorly, it feels like the rug was pulled out from under me.

Most damning of all is that Peglin lacks the aesthetic, dopaminergic je ne sais quoi that makes Peggle so ultra-satisfying. Hitting a peg is a flaccid act without whimsy, the visual feedback a nothingburger of a number, the audio presented as effective white noise. The labouriously slow traversal of the ball makes each shot a tedium, something the developers are clearly aware of as there is a prevalent fast forward button which can knock the speed up to 300%. I am never on the edge of my seat, gnawing my nails hoping my shot was planned correctly, that I will hit that last peg with my final shot, the world holding its breath. I never feel my aptitude increasing. I only feel my time is being wasted, just as Peglin's potential is.

The fundamental premise is very cool, and I think it has a lot of promise, but it's not quite there right now. I may open this up again when it's out of early access and see what kind of content was added, but as it stands, it's pretty shallow, it doesn't feel like there are very many viable builds, and there also just aren't that many builds available in the first place.

A lot of the balls and a lot of the items are a combination of uninteresting and completely worthless, which gives the sense that the designers just don't have a super good sense of how to make the game exciting. I won my first few runs where I got past Floor 1 pretty easily. After that, it was either a random chance whether I could even beat Floor 1 (it's basically an auto-lose on Mini-Boss rooms on Floor 1), and then it's random whether I could get all the tools required to survive the last boss. It really appeared that the only viable survivability build was stacking health regen on refreshing the board.

While it might be a bit odd to be leaving a review for a game that's still firmly in early access, I also feel like it's a perfectly fair thing to do due to the issues with the game that I have being things that feel a bit more fundamental to the game mechanics themselves. At first I absolutely loved the idea of this game, being another pretty unique take on a deckbuilder roguelike where your main method of attacking is basically playing Peggle. I love weird little ideas like this and seeing how they can be expanded into a full title, and it's been proven to work before with the slot machine deckbuilder of Luck be a Landlord, which is why I ended up being pretty disappointed with how this one turned out. The physics system itself is my main gripe with the game and the way that it feels closer to a rough approximation of what made Peggle's gameplay so fun and rewarding, but not quite hitting the mark at any point. The potential for cooler, flashier ricochets is lost when the ball simultaneously feels floaty but also made of lead, with the pegs similarly having both too much weight to them with how meekly you tend to see the ball bounce, but it doesn't feel like there's and real impact when the pegs are hit.

This one aspect of the gameplay alone ends up making for a pretty middling experience at the best of times, because I feel no real desire to continue interacting with a system that feels so unsatisfying to fully control, especially with some later maps ramping up the awkwardness in peg positioning. While it obviously makes sense to do this in order to provide a greater sense of scaling difficulty, it further takes away from the more compelling aspects of a game system like this, with any awesome shots you do make feeling more akin to luck as opposed to something you feel was largely influenced by your own actions. While this could be something that ultimately changes once the game is further along, I also feel that the fact that splash damage is such an overwhelmingly dominant strategy takes away from the experience a bit, especially with the way that the game has a relatively small selection of orbs and items making it rather easy to shape most runs into the same general archetype with minimal hassle. While I understand that players could still choose another build to strive for instead, it once again ends up being weakened by the sheer absurdity of how much more work it is to only have single target damage, clearing fights you usually could do in 4 - 6 turns into more than double that.

With the way the game is right now, I'll check in from time to time because I really do love watching games change over time through development, but I have my doubts that it will end up making things that much more enjoyable since as said, my issues with it are more fundamental that can't simply be changed with tweaking a few values around

They brought back peggle, and this time it has a kind of RPG meets roguelite theme. It's very cute and fun but short.

Gameplay is basically peggle but each orb has different mechanics for how it interacts with the pegs, and you accumulate new orbs as you play or level up existing orbs to become more powerful. At the same time enemies will constantly be approaching along the top of the screen, you deal damage with each peg hit based on the strength / features of the orb and you take damage if the enemies reach you.

It's a clever and simple design that's very easy to pick up and addicting to play. The only downside is that there's so little content. More is slowly getting added but because of how the game is built it's easy to experience everything quickly. A good idea with slightly too little substance, but a great starting point.

The review is below, but when you're done reading, check out my Perpetual Steam Game Giveaway list and think about picking up a free game. Just added a few more

Sights & Sounds
- Peglin is one of those cases in which I shied away from the promotional art but really liked the in-game visuals. Lots of charming little pixel art characters populate the forests, caves, and castles that dot the land. The Peglins (the little green goblin guys) are particularly cute with their floppy ears and little bags full of orbs
- The music is excellent. I thought that this was the type of game that I would mute while playing and instead listen to an album or a podcast, but I'm glad I tuned in to the game. The regular "fights" are backed by what sounds like great music from a platformer, while the boss battle themes sound like the corresponding songs from a JRPG
- The sound design was also quite good. In a game with extremely repetitive actions (all you do is aim and fire orbs), poor choices in sound effects have the potential to render a game too annoying to play. It's an odd compliment, but Peggle did a good job of choosing sounds for the constant reload, launch, ricochet, and explosion sound effects

Story & Vibes
- Is there a story in this game? I'm genuinely asking. If little goblins are going around attacking forest creatures and well-populated castles, they have to have some motivation, right? Not really
- There's tiny crumbs of world-building occasionally, but beyond that, this is a roguelike that doesn't appear to even bother with a framing story. Some may think a small narrative would be unnecessary in a game like this, but it's still a little disappointing string a few successful runs together and still learn nothing about why you're doing what you're doing
- The vibes are extremely chill since the gameplay isn't very active and the soundtrack is good. I could see this becoming a rainy day game. With so much of the game owing to luck (no one can really predict where the ball will go after the second ricochet or so), there's fun little successes and disappointments to keep things interesting, too

Playability & Replayability
- What's in a name? Well, in this case, a reference to the legendary Popcap game Peggle portmanteau'd together with the word "goblin". That second part's irrelevant to the gameplay, but the first part clues you into the core mechanic. Peglin is Peggle, but with a tasty roguelike RPG zing to it
- Like many roguelikes that take a page from Slay the Spire, Peglin maps are comprised of sets of branching one-way "trees" that intersect at symbols representing battles, slightly harder battles, shops, treasure rooms, and mystery spots. Regardless of the choices you make, however, all paths converge on the boss (picked from a small pool of them, it seems) you must defeat to progress to the next level
- Like Peggle, aiming the ball while trying to hit multipliers and simultaneously clearing as many pegs as possible is still your main objective, but instead of points, you do damage, and multipliers are crits. How much damage you do is highly dependent on the interactions between the special orbs and items you buy or otherwise find on your run. You can also level up your orbs to do more damage and add effects to them
- Failure is part of the game in roguelikes, but I'm having a hard time seeing the reward cycle in Peglin. There's no metaprogression, and with only 3 classes to unlock at this point, there's not a lot to try to chase down
- I often found it hard to get a good run going in Peglin. Sure, some synergies are extremely powerful, but the RNG deciding how where, how, and why certain items and orbs show up means that you'll often wind up with runs that go nowhere. My typical experience was finding a few pieces of a cohesive build early, then never seeing a relevant item or orb again. I'd then try to switch over to a backup plan and die before I could get my damage high enough
- Those rare runs were everything seems to go right, though? They're a good time. For example, I had a run with incredibly high DoT, a large number of crit pegs, and the ability to pierce an additional enemy with each crit. Most fights ended in a couple turns
- The replayability is a mixed bag. As much as I felt motivated to chase down those fun runs, they were unfortunately rare. And with no metaprogression and everything already unlocked, they kinda felt like a waste of time
- There is a challenge mode called Cruciball, but I haven't given it a try yet. Maybe when I make more items available in it (done by beating a run with that item first), I'll give it a try

Overall Impressions & Performance
- I really wanted to like this game more than I wound up enjoying it. It's very fun when things are going well, and I love the core gameplay loop. But a roguelike really needs to give you some reason to keep coming back
- Despite my complaints, I still wound up with an overall positive impression and think that it's a game worth playing. It's fun to buildcraft and strategize in Peglin, and the core pachinko gameplay is addictive in its randomness. I know the game is still in early access, so a lot could change, but I hope effort is put into trying to hook players rather than trying add more items or orbs. I think that would just compound my issues with the game
- This is an excellent Steam Deck title. I can easily see myself wanting to boot this up while traveling

Final Verdict
- 7/10. [insert overdone joke about sexual act here]

Peglin is a very cool idea, mixing Peggle games with the rogue-like genre. But lacks the variety of a good rogue like and the good feel/physics of Peggle. The levels get repetitive really fast and the build options that you get feels crafted. You never actually feel that you are breaking the game and making crazy combos (even when you do and kill bosses in one attack), because the combos available are always very obvious.
This could be the dream game because of how fun Peggle actually is, but the execution doesn't deliver.

A prime example of the grossly overpopulated species of roguelikes which, promisingly, take a game type which is already largely played for its passive recurrent game structure and then strap onto that system a randomly-generated pre-fab three floor map scheme, node based traversal systems that have item and relic accumulation, perma-death, and elites/bosses to provide additional challenge intermittently along pathways and at the capstones of biomes. Like so many of this 'gimmick' game type, it dies by the thousand little things that kill any game that has hit the 'we made a game' threshold but has not reached the 'we understand what makes the game we made' precipice that actually inducts good play. The balance is horrendous, offering maybe 4 good orbs out of 15, and those 4 orbs steamroll the entire game; there only 5-6 different enemy types (which all either fall into melee or range attackers), and there is so little strategy in dispatching them that the roguelike structure of finishing fights to see what reward you get is less satisfying that playing pachinko; no quality of life mechanisms exist to streamline the overly easy portions of the game, which consists of the entire back ~85% or so of the entire run, so the player is forced to sit through wastes of time such as 2 or 3 minutes of accruing overkill damage past the maximum health of the enemy encountered while their orb endlessly ricochets around the board racking up damage 100x the necessary kill amount.

In the hands of devs willing to run through a few more cycles of QA, this game could improve a bit - but in the end, it's pachinko that runs like dogshit on a high end gaming PC, heating up my system more than Elden Ring does.