Rollers of the Realm

I have a soft spot for games that should not exist on paper, and Rollers of the Realm is exactly that kind of oddity. Phantom Compass, a small Toronto studio, spent three years turning a whiteboard joke into a pinball RPG that earned a nomination at IndieCade and a Best in Play award at GDC before most people had even heard of it. The core idea is disarmingly simple: your party members are the balls. The Rogue is a light, quick pinball that deals massive backstab damage and can summon her dog as a multiball companion. The Knight is heavy and slow, perfect for smashing through destructible obstacles and shrugging off frontal attacks. The Healer patches up your flippers, which function as health bars that enemies chip down with ranged fire mid-battle. The Crone and other recruits you pick up via the campaign or in-game shop round out a roster of over ten characters, each with passive stat differences and a mana-gated active ability. Swapping between them mid-play, while keeping the active ball alive, adds a tactical layer that genuine pinball games simply cannot offer. The mechanics layer together with quiet intelligence. There is no tilt penalty; instead, each character has an agility stat that determines how much you can nudge the ball left or right with the analogue stick mid-flight. That single change transforms it from pure luck management into something closer to aim-based action. Levels cover RPG locations including towns, caves, and castles, and their table layouts range from straightforward single-screen arenas to multi-tiered labyrinths with hidden treasure chests gated behind precise physics challenges. Filling your mana bar by striking objects lets you revive fallen party members, which creates genuine comeback tension in the harder encounters. An Arena mode with online leaderboards gives the game legs after the five-chapter campaign wraps up, and completed levels can be replayed for gold and experience, which the game openly encourages as a substitute for traditional grinding. The reviews at launch landed in a telling spread, from enthusiastic (the pinball engine is genuinely responsive and intricate board design is a highlight across most outlets) to frustrated (GameSpot found the RPG seams too messy, Gamecritics noted the physics needed more polish). The honest reading is somewhere between those poles. Ball physics feel purposeful rather than silky, and a run of bad bounces late in the campaign can send you into a total-party-kill spiral faster than you can react. The story is entirely functional medieval boilerplate: a young rogue, a stolen dog, a wicked baron, and an escalating quest to save the realm. Nobody is playing for the narrative. Cutscenes, which cannot be skipped, become genuinely grating once you are replaying a boss stage for the eighth time. Voice acting is charming in patches and awkward in others. The atmosphere is pleasant and hand-drawn without being particularly memorable, which is the one area where I wished Phantom Compass had pushed harder. A stronger soundtrack to match the odd specificity of the concept would have elevated the whole thing. Who is this for, right now in 2025? If you find yourself drawn to Yoku's Island Express or any game that treats pinball as a world rather than a score-chasing table, this is the spiritual predecessor you missed. It runs on practically anything, controller support is solid on PC, and the campaign sits at a comfortable four to seven hours depending on how much replaying you do. It is not the most polished indie you will play this year, and the late-chapter difficulty spike will irritate players who expect a relaxed pace. But for the asking price and the sheer singularity of what Phantom Compass built, the craft earns more respect than its Metacritic 68 suggests. A small, handmade thing that knew exactly what it was trying to be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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