Peglin Review – Review – Nintendo World Report

I am in the category of never having played Peggle. Something about the passive nature of the gameplay where all you can do is watch, isn’t really for me. Though when Peglin released as a surprise for Nintendo Switch following a Nintendo Direct, I was intrigued. Perhaps this could be something like an idle game that would enthrall me. As I’ve become more familiar with pinball-like games, this could be a good middle ground between the two. Or so I thought. While Peglin did not convert me into a pachinko-like mindset, its core mechanics did make me return quite a few times to shooting balls at enemies.

Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Peglin is a roguelike indie game where you have to defeat all enemies within an area as you slowly upgrade your weapons and moveset before having to face off against a challenging boss. Peglin doesn’t necessarily touch new grounds and lays its cards pretty clearly out for anyone who starts the game. Its visual art style isn’t necessarily for me, with an almost Microsoft Paint-like approach to its pixel art, but it gets the job done. A nice variety of enemy types and locations keeps your journey through Peglin’s world feeling fresh.

The gameplay, however, is what can make or break Peglin for you. In Peglin, all you can do is fire off an orb at a board filled with pegs. Each peg you hit along the way increases the final damage your orb will do at the enemies on top of the board. There isn’t much input you have on the board, aside from which direction you will fire your orb. Certain pegs will provide you with more coins, multiply the damage output, give critical hits or add other properties to your attack. At the end of each round you are given the option to buy new orbs and add them to your lineup, which is randomized with every encounter. Or you can spend coins on improving and increasing the strength of your orbs. There are a ton of fun combinations and additional items you can find on your quest that amplify the capabilities of your orbs. But these always feel pretty well balanced. For example, I found an item that would give me a multiball, meaning every orb would be duplicated when fired, but this would also only lock me into firing only in specific directions. It is this push and pull that can make certain combat encounters quite challenging to overcome, but deeply rewarding when you do, in particular the bosses, who can mess up your board by putting sticky lines between the pegs that can cause your orbs to get stuck, or create new enemies.

I think my personal experience with Peglin lies somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, I just loved firing away the orbs and stacking high damage, much like a game of pinball. But on the other hand there is a lot of passive energy to the game. After firing the orb there isn’t much strategizing you can do; you can select which item your attack will hit, which is absolutely necessary when fighting bosses or hordes of particular enemies, but that’s basically it. The game doesn’t make you feel as involved with the overall approach. This is compounded by the lack of proper tutorials explaining the mechanics and additional actions. It was surprisingly late that I discovered that you can discard orbs from your lineup, in order to make other attacks come up faster that may deal elemental damage to certain enemies. For a pick-up-and-play title I found myself strategizing much more than actually playing the game, which felt like a bit of a barrier to overcome.

Finally, as this game is a roguelike with a lot of random chance involved, I often got stuck in situations where I was unable to overcome a fight I could’ve won. That is because it can be quite hard to recover health in between enemy encounters or simply because your good attacks missed the critical hit peg to deal their massive damage. At the end of a run you can’t upgrade your attack permanently and have to start over from the beginning. The furthest I managed to get in the game felt like a moment where the stars aligned, rather than me being a particularly good player. This can be make or break for certain types of players and caused me to often put the game down for a long period of time. Yet, I kept returning to Peglin and the simple yet addictive way in which it made me keep shooting orbs at pegs to see if I could get further again and again.

Peglin definitely is not for everyone. Its roguelike structure combined with a surprising amount of luck that is required to see the end of the game took quite a long time to grow on me. The lack of properly explained mechanics and way in which you can’t influence the board made me feel quite frustrated as a player. But there is a very good game at its core, which kept me coming back again and again. When you get a proper combination of attacks and elemental damage going it is so much fun to take bosses down in just a few shots. The barrier of entry is a tad high for my taste, but once the orb got rolling I couldn’t get myself to stop. In the end Peglin feels like one of those great background games, that I can see players picking up again and again. I can’t look ahead in my crystal ball, but I foresee that Peglin may just stick around for quite some time.