I’ve always been someone who never quite got into Peggle. The idea of a game where you mostly just sit back and watch isn’t particularly appealing to me. However, when Peglin unexpectedly launched on the Nintendo Switch after a Nintendo Direct, it piqued my interest. Maybe it could be like an idle game but with enough excitement to engage me. Having dabbled with pinball-style games recently, I hoped it might strike a balance between the two. Well, it didn’t completely change my perspective on pachinko-like games, but its core gameplay did have me returning for more rounds of ball-bouncing enemy encounters.
Let me give you the rundown. Peglin is a roguelike indie game where your goal is to defeat all the enemies in each area. As you progress, you get to upgrade your weapons and abilities in preparation for a showdown with a challenging boss. It doesn’t really break any new ground and lays everything out clearly from the start. Its visual style, reminiscent of Microsoft Paint pixel art, isn’t exactly my taste, yet it manages to serve its purpose. A nice mix of enemy types and environments keeps the exploration of Peglin’s world interesting and varied.
The gameplay mechanics in Peglin could be the deciding factor for players. You primarily launch orbs at a board filled with pegs, and each peg you hit increases the damage inflicted on foes perched at the top. Your input is mostly limited to choosing the direction of your orb’s flight. Some pegs grant additional coins, boost damage, or offer critical hits and other effects. After each round, you can buy new orbs or enhance the ones you have, choosing from a randomized pool each time. There are fun combinations and extra items to find during your journey that amplify your orbs’ abilities, maintaining a fine balance. I once picked up an item that gave me a multiball effect, doubling every orb fired, but it also limited my firing directions. This kind of gameplay tension can make combat encounters both tricky and rewarding, particularly when bosses complicate your board with sticky lines that trap your orbs or spawn new adversaries.
My experience with Peglin lands somewhere in between enjoyment and frustration. I genuinely loved launching orbs around and racking up high damage like in a pinball game. Yet, there’s a lot of passive waiting involved. After launching an orb, your main choice is picking which item to target, essential during boss fights or when swarmed by foes, but that’s about it. The game doesn’t feel as engaging as it could be in terms of strategy. This was compounded by incomplete tutorials explaining its mechanics. It was a while before I realized you can discard orbs from your lineup to bring forward others that might deal elemental damage to certain enemies. For a pick-up-and-play game, I found myself strategizing more than playing, which became a hurdle.
Being a roguelike, Peglin involves a lot of randomness, often leaving me stuck in fights I felt I should have won. Health recovery between battles can be tough, and sometimes your key hits miss critical spots. Each run starts from scratch with no permanent upgrades. The farthest I got felt more like sheer luck than skilled play. This can be discouraging for certain players, prompting me at times to take breaks from the game. Yet, I found myself returning to Peglin, drawn by its straightforward but captivating premise of shooting orbs at pegs just to see if I could get a bit further.
While Peglin might not cater to everyone, its roguelike nature intertwined with an element of luck took time to grow on me. The lack of well-explained mechanics and inability to directly influence the board often left me frustrated. Still, at its heart, there’s a solid game that kept pulling me back. When you nail a combo of attacks and elemental impacts, bringing down bosses in a few hits feels fantastic. Though the entry barrier is a bit high for my liking, once I got the hang of it, I couldn’t stop playing. Ultimately, Peglin feels like one of those great games to have running in the background, one that players might find themselves revisiting time and again. While I can’t predict the future, I have a hunch that Peglin might just hang around for a while in gaming circles.
