Peglin

I have a complicated relationship with games that hand most of their power budget to the physics engine. Peglin is the kind of roguelike where you can read every tooltip, plan the perfect orb loadout, and still watch your run collapse because your Pebball decided to clip a single peg in the wrong corner. That tension is the whole point, and whether you find it thrilling or maddening will tell you everything you need to know about whether Peglin is for you. The core loop is disarmingly simple: you play as a tiny green goblin working through three areas - a forest, a castle, and a dark mine - by shooting orbs at pachinko-style pegboards to deal damage to turn-based enemies. The more pegs you hit, the harder you swing. Critical pegs amplify damage, refresh pegs reset the board mid-shot, and bomb pegs turn the whole screen into a satisfying explosion of numbers. Between fights, you draft new orbs and collect relics, building a run-specific loadout in the same vein as Slay the Spire's card-and-relic framework. The four playable classes - Peglin, Balladin, Roundrel, and Spinventor - each come with distinct starting conditions and are unlocked through specific in-game challenges, giving you a genuine reason to keep playing after that first cleared run. Where Peglin earns real respect is in its moment-to-moment chaos. Landing a multiball relic alongside a bomb orb build and watching an entire board detonate in sequence is the kind of mechanical poetry the genre lives for. The orb roster has genuine depth once you start parsing synergies: Infernorb feeds bomb builds, pierce-capable options handle multi-enemy encounters, and the right relic combination can push damage into numbers that are almost comedically large. After clearing the base three-act structure, Cruciball mode opens up, stacking escalating debuffs across twenty difficulty tiers that will systematically dismantle any assumptions you had about a comfortable meta. That is real post-game mileage. The honest criticisms are worth flagging. Once you stack the most efficient relics, the ones that magnetize your ball toward special pegs or fire automatic multiballs, your actual involvement in a given shot narrows to clicking a general direction and watching the result. Runs can feel like they are happening to you rather than being executed by you. Build variety also has a ceiling: after a handful of hours, most viable orb combinations will have revealed themselves, and the peg board layouts repeat often enough that surprise wears thin. The audio is undercooked for a game this physics-dependent; there is very little satisfying feedback to reinforce big hits, which is a strange miss for a genre that typically weaponizes sound design. And as a narrative-focused RPG specialist, I will be upfront: there is no story here. A loose premise about dragons stealing gold, a handful of flavour events, and that is it. If you came for character arcs and lore depth, Peglin is the wrong address. What it is, though, is an extremely well-tuned "one more run" machine. Each attempt clocks in around an hour when things go smoothly, the whole package is mechanically approachable in minutes, and the Cruciball ladder gives dedicated players a long runway of escalating challenge. The Steam community sits at 88% positive across ten thousand reviews, which is a signal worth respecting. It is not a game that will rewrite the genre, and it leans hard enough on luck that some runs will feel frankly unjust. But when the RNG gods align, when a Spinventor run chains together three orb synergies and clears a boss in two shots, Peglin delivers a specific flavor of chaotic satisfaction that very few games manage to bottle.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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