After a tough day behind the scenes here, I decided I needed to play something a bit more relaxing than usual. Luckily for me, I had recently accepted a code for Pop! Pachinko, and so when I saw the game sitting there near the top of my Steam news feed, reminding me of its existence, I was able to dive right in.
Pop! Pachinko is the work of dev duo Pangolin Interactive and Robot Lion Games, and the game that they just released on PC (Win) has some of the most relaxing vibes I’ve ever encountered in the genre, making it the perfect antidote to my stressful day.
Previous Peggle-likes have impressed me, and I particularly enjoyed both Peglin and Ballionaire in recent times, so Pop! Pachinko looked like it might be right up my street when I first saw it.
I wasn’t wrong: not only is it an engaging and satisfying pachinko roguelike, but it feels quite different from the games I’ve just mentioned and therefore is very much its own thing.
One of the best things about Pop! Pachinko is the aesthetic, which has a vintage style and plenty of swagger. Of course, the audio experience is optional, and you don’t need to engage with that side of the game if you don’t want to, but I appreciate what the devs have done with regard to the audio-visuals.
I also really like the more relaxed approach to firing your balls at each board of pegs. A simple click and hold of either mouse button determines the power of your shot, but after that, it’s down to the synergies that your balls are able to find as they fall between the pegs on their journey down.
After each round, you’ll visit a shop where you can buy more balls to add to those you start with. Then it’s back into the next round to fire off those new balls and mix them up with the old ones, and hopefully score enough points for the resulting synergies. It’s here that Pop! Pachinko really shines, and at times the board can light up with interesting visual effects as a multitude of balls wriggle down the screen in search of points, all of them interacting in their own way.
There are different targets to aim at in each level, so there is definitely an element of control and agency as you aim the stream of balls you fire onto the board. That said, it’s a gentle lift compared to most other roguelike games out there, and I found the simple interactions to be relaxing and relatively pressure-free in the grand scheme of things.
The credits you earn can buy new items and even stages, but the joy of Pop! Pachinko, for me at least, comes from building up those synergies in each new attempt. Not only are there loads of gentle decisions to make between stages, but playing the levels is an audio-visual treat, especially when the screen lights up with synergies and those points start rolling in.
Pop! Pachinko is out now on PC (Win), and I played the game via access kindly provided by the game developers and their PR buds
