I’ve always been someone who never really got into Peggle. Something about the game’s passive nature, where you’re more of a spectator, just didn’t click with me. However, when Peglin made a surprise debut on the Nintendo Switch after a Nintendo Direct, I found myself curious. Could it be the kind of idle game that might finally capture my attention? With my growing interest in pinball-like games, I thought Peglin could offer a perfect blend between the two genres. While it didn’t completely turn me into a fan of pachinko-style games, its fundamental mechanics did entice me back to hurling orbs at foes more often than I expected.
Let me know if this sounds familiar: Peglin is a roguelike indie game where your goal is to defeat all the enemies in an area, gradually enhancing your arsenal and skill set before taking on a formidable boss. It doesn’t really break new ground but lays out its premise pretty transparently for new players. The art style, reminiscent of something created in Microsoft Paint with its pixel art approach, isn’t quite my cup of tea, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do. What keeps your adventure through Peglin fresh is the nice mix of enemy types and locations.
The gameplay, though, is what will either grip you or leave you indifferent. In Peglin, your main action is firing an orb at a board strewn with pegs. Each peg hit adds to the damage inflicted on enemies at the board’s top. Your control is mostly limited to the direction of your shot. Some pegs yield more coins, amplify damage, offer critical hits, or enhance your attack in other ways. After each round, you can either purchase new orbs to add randomly to your lineup or spend coins to boost the strength of existing ones. The game offers a plethora of entertaining combos and extra items to discover, which enhance your orbs’ potency. These tend to be quite balanced. I discovered an item that granted a multiball effect, doubling my shots, but restricted my firing angles. This balancing act makes victories, especially against bosses who might gunk up the board with sticky lines or spawn new enemies, challenging yet satisfying.
My experience with Peglin sits somewhere in the middle. On one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed launching the orbs and racking up big scores, very much like a pinball game. On the other, there’s an undeniable passive element to it. After launching the orb, your strategic choices boil down to selecting which items your attack will hit—essential especially against tough foes—but that’s really it. This lack of deeper engagement with your strategy is compounded by the absence of detailed tutorials on gameplay mechanics and actions. I only realized much later that you could discard orbs from your lineup to cycle through attacks faster, which is crucial for leveraging elemental damage against some opponents. Though designed as an easy-to-pick-up title, I found myself strategizing more than actually playing, which felt like an obstacle to enjoyment.
Because Peglin is a roguelike with a heavy reliance on randomness, I frequently ended up in battles that seemed unwinnable, often due to difficulty in restoring health between encounters or simply missing critical hits that were crucial to success. Once a run ends, any progress made upgrading your attacks is wiped, forcing a restart from scratch. The furthest I got felt less like a testament to skill and more like a confluence of right circumstances. This aspect can be a dealbreaker for some, and it made me step away from the game for extended periods. Yet, there was something undeniably addictive about firing orbs at pegs, which kept drawing me back to Peglin, enticing me to see if I could push further.
Peglin isn’t a game for everyone. Its roguelike format mixed with a hefty dose of luck needed to reach the end took a while to win me over. The poorly explained mechanics and limited influence on the board were somewhat frustrating. Yet beneath these layers was a genuinely solid game that compelled me to return time and time again. When you find the perfect combo of attacks and elemental damage, taking down bosses with just a few hits is immensely rewarding. Though the entry barrier was higher than I’d prefer, once I got the hang of it, the game was hard to put down. Ultimately, Peglin shines as a great game to have in the background, likely one that players will revisit repeatedly. While I can’t predict the future, I have a feeling Peglin might just be around for quite a while.
