What do you get when you cross the infamously successful Peggle with the deck-building and rogue-like mechanics of Slay the Spire? In my extensive experience so far, you’d have one of the most addicting indie games of the year thus far in: Peglin.
In Red Nexus Games’ Peglin, you play as a cute little goblin who needs to fight their way through a (incredibly cute) pixelated world by essentially playing pachinko to defeat your enemies. I really can’t describe it much better than that lore-wise, so let me jump straight into the gameplay.
For anyone who somehow managed to miss experiencing Peggle, the core gameplay of Peglin might come across as a bit foreign, but it’s an incredibly satisfyingly and addicting loop. Gameplay is turn-based, as you spend your turns dealing damage to various enemy-types by hurling an ‘orb’ (more on these later) down a pachinko board in an attempt to hit as many pegs as possible, all the while enemies slowly approach for melee or ranged attacks. Damage you deal is determined by how many pegs or tiles you actually manage to hit with your orb, which can have varying affects dependent on what type of tile you hit. If at any point your health is reduced to 0, alike all rogue-likes, you have to start from scratch (and hope the RNG odds are in your favour).
Scattered across each board/level you can hit bomb pegs, which allow you to hurl a bomb dealing damage to all enemies on-screen, alongside critical pegs, which after being hit increase the amount of damage you’ll deal to your enemies. There’s also refresh pegs, which refills the entire game board adding more pegs to be hit. Once a level is complete, you haul your orb one final time towards the desired path you want to follow on the Spire-style branching map (which due to my inability to aim, always ended up being the path I didn’t want to take).
As mentioned, the ‘deck-building’ side of Peglin takes the form of the artillery of orbs you assemble and upgrade as you progress, complimented by the relics you gather which give you various bonuses. Each new orb type gets increasingly fun, powerful and quirky as you play, like the Daggorb which increases its damage done if you hit a critical peg, to the Omegorb which changes the actual value of pegs on the boar. There’s even an orb just called ‘Egg’, which I won’t spoil for you, you’ll just have to experience it for yourself!
For someone who has owned and played the life out of every version of Peggle that has ever released, alongside being completely obsessed with TCG’s and deck building games, Peglin meshes these two genres flawlessly. I’m still yet to actually ‘beat’ the game, but that’s at no fault whatsoever to the game or its developers, it’s much more related to my inability to aim. Excitingly, the developers have plenty of additions planned for the core game throughout the early access period, with plans to include difficulty ranks, seeded runs, and a meta-progression system (just to name a few).You can find Peglin on Steam and Itch.io for Windows and Mac, and even try the demo if your curiosity has been sparked!
