It is the year 2011. I’m holding a Sony Ericsson J105, waiting for ‘Brick Breaker Revolution’ to load on the tiny 2-inch screen. I click on the endless “revolution” mode. I look bored. Disinterested. I’m so good at the game that I don’t even know why I bother to play it anymore. It’s just something to do with my hands, I guess. I tell myself that I’ll stop playing once I get the rocket power-ups. It’s no fun after that part of the game. My thumbs are trained to rest at the 2 and 4 keys. Muscle memory. The ball shoots forward. I flick the paddle into place without even thinking. The ball moves exactly where I want it to. The bricks break.
In 2013, I upgraded to a new shiny touchscreen device. ‘Brick Breaker’ lay forgotten, untouched, in its now permanent home — at the back of a dusty drawer. Over a decade since, a weird sense of déjá vu hits me as I install this new game called ‘Ball X Pit’. It’s all very dramatic. A mild breeze drifts through the window, leaves rustle, and there’s this aura glowing around my head. The game loads. It whispers to me. “Welcome back. I was waiting for you.”
The thing is, at first glance, ‘Ball X Pit’ seems nothing like ‘Brick Breaker Revolution’. With its old-word pixel style graphics, ball shooting mechanic, and rogue-lite deck building elements, it also evades any sense of labeling it. But to me, its lineage dates all the way back to 1976 when the game ‘Atari Breakout’ first came out.
‘Ball X Pit’ is not all that difficult to grasp. You control a character that autoshoots balls at incoming enemies. You can move the character up, down, left, right, and also decide the angles at which the projectiles are shot. Gems drop, you pick them up. In true roguelite fashion, you can also choose from a branching web of upgrades that vanish once the level ends. The brick breaker playstyle is particularly useful in the way you shoot the ball — usually, shooting at an angle gets more bounces out of a powerful ball and kills the most enemies. But its simplicity and nostalgia aren’t why this game is so good.
Despite it being quite simple in terms of controls, it manages to create a constant, claustrophobic tension through a building horde of enemies. First, there’s just one line of them far away. And then instantly they multiply and the entire screen is covered in tiny blocks of skeletons…honestly, it’s terrifying. And as they slowly but surely find their way down a vertical screen (kind of like Tetris blocks?), it manages to give you just about enough ammo to diffuse it. And never easily. How? Well, this harkens back to the ‘Brick Breaker’ legacy. The projectiles you shoot are balls. Upgrades kind of make them super balls. Having an ice-shooter ball can, for example, freeze enemies and make them weaker. As you level up the ice-shooter, it could potentially be combined with a laser ball to create this mega ice beam disc that freezes entire groups of enemies that it touches.
I thoroughly enjoyed the very alchemical way in which upgrades could be merged/fused and even evolved. At some point, I remember combining two balls to create a mosquito shooter, which leeched enemies of their health and gave it all to me! The game also kind of makes you rely on your instincts and risk taking abilities. What kind of player would you be? Do you go take the frankly dangerous path to the power up that is housed between enemies? Or would you rather hold your ground for another five seconds to see if it can get freed up?
The game is currently available on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Mac, PC, and Xbox. It’s an easy game to pick up and play for beginners.
(Written by Anusha Ganapathi of The New Indian Express)