Roguelike deckbuilders! They’re everywhere! It’s a bit of an epidemic, honestly, sorting the wheat from chaff is a tough job. Of course, once in a while a genuinely novel take on the genre rolls around, and PinKeep has done just that, a pinball game where you change the playfield as you progress through runs. And it’s from the devs behind the Far series and Herdling!

The pinball element is likely self explanatory. There’s a ball, it gets shot off, and you have two flippers to hit it with, nothing new there. It’s everything else around it that’ll have you thinking about the beautiful game (in this world the beautiful game is pinball). Runs are split up into different themed stages, and it’s up to you to add elements to the main playing field.

So, for example, say you want a bumper somewhere on the field to propel your ball along, you choose from the cards you’ve collected, and place it at various fixed points. You can rotate such structures to your liking, but to play these cards you need to spend money. To get money, you need to use your ball to destroy trees and rocks. Then you collect resources from these destroyed elements of nature, selling them to merchants at the top of the screen, of which you get to by flinging your ball successfully towards them.

This is further complicated by enemies slowly progressing towards your town of operations, and if they manage to reach you, you lose a bit of health. You’d think hitting enemies would be as much a bit of luck as it is skill, but you also have the ability to slow down time and flick your ball anytime you like, allowing you to line it up just so to take down an enemy combatant.

All this took some getting used to, with the fast-paced nature of pinball mixed with slowing down to plot out where you want being an interesting tactical exercise. The thing is, I just don’t think you can go wrong with pinball, but the way you can build upon it here makes it much more strategic. Take the aforementioned bumper you can add in. It comes with the added effect of a little goblin that sits on top of it who shoots out arrows at incoming arrows if you hit said bumper.

When you build up your field just right there’s a nice harmony to it all. I do wonder if adding in changes to the slow motion flick or the flippers themselves would add something or overcomplicate things, but as it is in its current demo, PinKeep is heading in the right direction. You can try it out for yourself, or just wishlist it, right here.