Video Game / BALL x PIT

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When the great city of Ballbylon is destroyed by a mysterious meteor, a massive pit filled with monsters and treasure is all that remains. Players take on the role of various treasure hunters who flock to the ruins to seek their fortune and, eventually, rebuild Ballbylon.

The core gameplay has been described as a blend of Breakout and Vampire Survivors. Players control a hero at the bottom of the screen, launching an arsenal of magical balls to destroy an advancing wall of enemies descending slowly from the top. Defeating these enemies yields experience points which can be used to power up your existing balls or add new ones to your arsenal. Fully leveled balls can be fused together to create powerful new projectiles with combined effects or evolved with them to create entirely new effects.

Between runs into the pit, players return to their homestead, New Ballbylon, which they can expand with buildings that provide gameplay bonuses, unlock new characters, and allow for automated resource generation. The game features a cast of over a dozen playable characters, each with unique mechanics.

TROPE x LIST

• A.I. Breaker: The Renegade's AI is very effective but it seems to still assume balls will travel in a direct line and bounce off obstacles accordingly. This causes it to struggle with certain partners such as the Physicist^note the AI will sometimes get stuck firing balls at an enemy only for them to miss due to their curved path and Carouser^note the AI keeps their distance instead of getting close to enemies so the orbiting balls can damage them.
• Ability Mixing:
  • The Ball Fusion system lets you combine two level 3 balls into either a fusion (a hybrid with both properties) or an evolution (something entirely new). Fusions will usually combine the benefits of the status effects applied by one of the parent balls with the area of effect benefits of the other, which can result in chain reaction effects from, say, a ball with laser beam effects applying multiple instances of splash damage effects or bleed stacks across entire rows or columns at once.
  • Some combinations can cause both of the applied effects to keep reapplying each other, for example Infestation with Holy Cross, where the Infestation debuff also fires Holy Cross lasers from the afflicted enemies, which in turn spread the Infestation to anything they hit and eventually makes the entire formation of enemies take constant Infestation damage while they blast each other with lasers.
  • Once you construct the Matchmaker building, you can bring two characters into a run, combining their abilities together.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The very first boss of the game, Skeleton King, crawls towards the player characters while attacking. The rest of bosses are either stationary or ones that flee from you.
• Airborne Mook: Some angelic enemies of HEAVENLY x GATES can temporarily levitate to get out of ball range.
• Anti-Entrenchment Mook: Boomshrooms are purple mushrooms that launch a barrage of fungal artillery at your current position. These AoE attacks land after a short delay, forcing you to move or be hit.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If any collectibles on the field would be blocked by a boss, they are automatically magnetized to the player.
  • If you beat a level on a faster tier than Normal, the game will mark all tiers below it as completed. Furthermore, if you beat a level with a Partner, the second character will get credit for beating that level.
  • If you die during a run, you'll keep any gold and resources you collected.
  • The game outright won't let you select clashing styles for partners if they would provide no benefit, such as not using the Physicist and the Flagellant. ^note  The Physicist makes balls weighted with gravity towards the back of the field, whereas the Flagellant makes balls bounce off the bottom of the screen. So the balls would never bounce off the bottom with this combination, making the Flagellant's power useless. Therefore, you can't select the Flagellant as the Physicist's partner or vice versa to prevent unnecessary frustration.
  • Passive Items which require a specific ball to make use of will only appear after finding the corresponding ball, such as the Frozen Spike (which causes Frozen enemies to deal AOE damage around them) only appearing when you have a ball that can cause the Frozen status effect.
  • The Shieldbearer has gameplay similar to a classic Breakout game — using a large paddle to bounce balls off of it. Since the Shieldbearer thus naturally benefits from staying at the bottom of the screen, anything dropped by enemies is automatically brought to the Shieldbearer, no matter how far away it is. Similarly, the Tactician's turn-based mode makes walking around to collect drops impractical, so they automatically collect them too.
  • If you're playing a character who doesn't get any baby balls and thus has very few balls to work with, Angelic Snatchers will let go of the ball they steal after holding it a short time.
  • The Tactician's inability to dodge projectiles when it's not their turn is adjusted for by letting them destroy certain projectiles that other characters can't.
• Arc Symbol: 'x' is used throughout the game to indicate a combination of two things. It appears in the names of ball fusions, characters pairings, levels, and of course, the title of the game itself.
• Area of Effect:
  • The Earthquake ball is an AoE-focused ball, dealing additional damage to units in a 3×3 square surrounding the target.
  • Several characters' residences provide bonuses to nearby buildings or resources, encouraging strategic base-building to optimize their benefits.
  • The Makeshift Sisyphus not only starts with the Earthquake ball but his unique perk amplifies AoE Damage at the cost of being unable to deal direct damage.
• Asteroids Monster: Two enemies, the Grub Cluster and the Moonling Geode, split into several smaller enemies when defeated. Area of Effect attacks are very effective against them.
• Astral Finale: The final level, THE VAST x VOID takes place on the rocky, cratered surface of the moon. Broken architecture, including columns and archways, litter the edges of the stage, suggesting that there was once a civilization here.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Skeleton King, the boss of THE BONE x YARD, can only be damaged by hitting his crown. His arms block you from taking direct shots at it, so it's necessary to bounce balls off the back wall or bring along a piercing ball to defeat him.
• Audience Participation: The gimmick of the False Messiah is your Twitch chat gets to vote on what balls, items, fusions, etc., to pick.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Multi-part evolutions can be this. You only have 4, 5 when upgraded, slots to work with. Deadeyes's cross is notable as it 4 materials and is in your passive slot. Without upgrades it's almost impossible to get as the game doesn't let you skip level ups. It then has another fusion item, itself a fusion, which then needs more of the right passives to work consistently as it trades in the crit rate it gave you for all crits being instakills on normal enemies and a only a small crit chance is left over. Nosferatu is worse in some ways but better in others. It needs three evolved balls ^note  all three sharing an ingredient with another one of the set meaning you're going to have to fish for the ingredients again after making an evolution. and only then can they fuse back into one ball. Adding on that you're unlikely to get either of them before beating the boss means you're almost certainly going to only use them in endless mode. That said they are pretty fun in endless, and at least decently usable in the unassambled forms.
  • Certain fusion results can be more trouble to get than they're worth. The Black Hole line is a good example as it makes you make a three ball fusion, Fire and Light into Sun and then add Darkness, which ends on a ball that vanishes on hit and can only instant kill normal units while dealing decently high single damage to bosses but the 7 second reload makes even that damage negligible. It has fusions that can work the instant kill very well but unless it's set up ahead of time and you get lucky with reactor drops it's dead weight until you can get that fusion, which will require getting 2 levels on the black hole as fusion balls are always level 1 on creation.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Sabretooth, boss of the Gory Grasslands, isn't a sabretooth, but rather a six-wheeled open-topped self-propelled transport filled with goblin archers.
• Back from the Dead: The Necromancer building will let you revive once per run while also destroying a group of common enemies. When fully upgraded, you can revive with 75% health.
• Back Stab:
  • The Shade is an assassin who attacks from the top of the screen, striking enemies from behind with an increased chance to crit.
  • The Ruby Hilted Dagger item also enhances critical chance when hitting an enemy in the back.
  • The Assassin ball passes through the front of enemies, but not the back, allowing it to travel straight to the enemy's backline where it deals increased damage.
• Bandit Mook: Angelic Snatchers in HEAVENLY x GATES will grab one of your balls and hold onto it until killed. The second boss is a variant of this enemy which can steal up to three balls at once.
• Boring, but Practical: The Nuke which requires bomb (Fire X Iron) and then poison for a screen wide attack with poison. It's a bit slow on recharge but it's easy to make, decent damage on its own, and makes for an easy combo material that can be gotten early game.
• Breaking Out: The core gameplay is a variant of this genre. The enemies spawn on various blocks at the top of the screen and slowly descend towards the bottom, which the player attempts to stop by bouncing balls off them.
• The Beastmaster: The Falconer has a pair of pet falcons who hover at the edges of the field, and they're the ones who fire balls.
• Bullet Hell: While there are projectile-shooting enemies, their density isn't high enough to qualify. Bosses, on the other hand, shoot a lot of projectiles with tight spaces to maneuver between them.
• Cap:
  • Balls and items max out at level 3. Once two balls have reached the maximum level they can be fused, or, if they are compatible, evolved.
  • Damage-per-hit is capped at 9999. This is high enough that it's unlikely to be relevant for an initial playthrough, but you can definitely run up against it in New Game+ or by continuing a run after defeating a boss.
• Charm Person: The Charm ball has a chance to charm an enemy on hit. Charmed enemies will temporarily join your side, turning to fight against their former comrades.
• Commonplace Rare: The most valuable and difficult to acquire resource in the game is stone.
• Cosmic Horror Story: A downplayed example considering the Excuse Plot, but the revelation that the Final Boss, none other than The Moon - and a sentient, aggressive entity with a huge disposal of equally eldritch minions at that- is what created the titular Pit squarely lands the game into this territory. Ballbylon supposedly being reborn through it using eight characters as sacrifices in true ending doesn't help the matters either.
• Damage Over Time: Burn and Poison are the DoT-focused balls. In addition to dealing contact damage, they apply status effects which gradually whittle down an enemy's health.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The Lord of Owls, boss of HEAVENLY x GATES, has a lot of health and significant periods of invulnerability, making it take a very long time to kill by boss standards without specific evolutions.
• Dem Bones: In the BONE x YARD, the enemy lineup consists of animated skeletons.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: When enough enemies are on the screen at a single time, they can begin chanting along with the background music.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Some of the strongest evolutions require fusing other evolutions, which is a lengthy process that can be hindered by RNG. Most prominent is the Nosferatu, which requires the Vampire Lord (Vampire x Dark), Mosquito King (Vampire x Brood Mother) and Spider Queen (Brood Mother x Egg Sack) but will result in you constantly firing life-draining vampire bats to devastate the foes.
• The Dividual: The Cohabitants are a couple that share a character slot.
• Double Unlock: To unlock buildings, first you need to get the blueprint to drop in the level, which is a little bit of RNG. Then you need to have the gold and resources to build it. Then you need to actually construct it, which involves bouncing the characters off it during Harvest mode at base.
• Dual Boss: The second miniboss of Liminal X Desert consists of two entities.
• Early Game Hell: In many ways, the game actually becomes easier as you progress. As you play, you'll unlock buildings, characters, items, and balls that will increase your power level. But in those early runs when you're struggling to bootstrap your economy and many of the most powerful upgrades are locked behind several layers of progression, the game can be downright tough!
• Eldritch Abomination: The Moon is an intelligent celestial body out of stone with eight eyes and supernatural powers that created the titular pit by literally plummeting through city of Ballbylon.
• Eldritch Location: The titular pit. It is broken into eight drastically different layers, populated by monsters such as animated skeletons, snow creatures, lizards and scorpions, mushroom people and more, requires a gigantic lift to traverse is said to host many riches. Reaching the VAST x VOID reveals that the celestial object that made the pit penetrated the planet all the way to the other side, creating a space area with a single levitating stone path at the center populated by sphere-shaped Moonlings.
• Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors: Averted. Neither elemental weaknesses nor elemental resistances exist; the Freeze ball is just effective against the icy enemies of THE SNOWY x SHORES as it is against the dragons of THE SMOLDERING x DEPTHS.
• Essence Drop: Glowing experience orbs are the most common things defeated enemies drop.
• Everybody Calls Him "Barkeep": The player characters are called in accordance to their occupation, such as The Warrior, The Itchy Finger and so on.
• Excuse Plot: The plot is exceedingly thin, serving only as a basic framing device for the game's real focus, its gameplay. A mysterious object has fallen from the sky, making a deep pit where the town of Ballbylon once was. The crater thus has attracted many adventures, who build town next to the pit and use a gigantic lift to descend it's depths.
• Eyes Out of Sight: Several characters, including The Warrior, The Itchy Finger, and The Repentant have their eyes covered by an Eye-Obscuring Hat.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The game includes reanimated undead, yeti monsters, desert predators, Mushroom People, orcs and goblins, dragonic humanoids, actual angels and denizens of the Moon occupying the layers of same space
• Gainax Ending: The ending of the game veers into this, which is understandable given the lack of story previously. After defeating "The Moon", a door on its side opens and the character enters, resulting in a technicolor sequence of The Moon being orbited by the character. Defeating the boss with eight separate characters, one for each door, causes the Moon to expel technicolor waves of the enemies fought during the game before rising from the pit as a technicolor Ballbylon.
• Gameplay Automation: Two of the playable characters automate gameplay to some extent.
  • The Cogitator automatically chooses balls, items, and fusions for you. He can be played as a self-imposed challenge, or simply as a way of experimenting with loadouts you wouldn't usually pick for yourself. The Cogitator's algorithm is decent, and can help the player learn new fusions in the early game (the Cogitator will always aim for fusions where possible, even ones unknown to the player), but is unlikely to manage advanced fusions and sometimes stumbled into bone-headed anti-synergies with passive choices.
  • The Radical takes things even further by literally playing the entire stage for you. He's mostly just a novelty, although he can be used for low-effort Money Grinding.
• Gravity Screw: In THE VAST x VOID, the path is littered with starry holes. If the player or a ball falls into it, they'll fall out of the sky a short distance away.
• Guide Dang It!: The game does not display possible evolutions exist unless the player has the two constituent items at level 3 on collecting a Fusion reactor. While this encourages experimentation, there is no hint that multi-stage evolutions exist. In addition, there is no evidence that evolutions can consist of more than two items, making it unlikely to happen upon the two examples by chance.
• Hazard Attack: Several of the Earthquake ball's evolutions spawn hazards on the field which damage and apply status effects to enemies that pass over them.
• Healing Potion: Defeated enemies will occasionally drop a flask of red liquid. Collecting it will restore some of your missing health.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: There are a few attacks that deal more damage against tight groups. Plant (Earth X Cell) and Rage (Fire X Charm) both punish enemies around the victim, Plant as area damage Rage as damage over time. There are also a number of balls with area damage/infliction, such as Earth hitting a square around any enemy it connects with or a nunber of fusions meant to deal area damage one way or another. The damage is represented by Intelligence stat, while Makeshift Sysiphus quadruples it further to compensate for lack of Baby Balls.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Angelic Snatchers (and the miniboss version) can grab and hold onto one of your balls until you kill or freeze them to get it back. This can easily backfire on them if they grab a ball with a particularly vicious Herd-Hitting Attack like the Sun.
• Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance: The Fusion mechanic allows for two balls to be combined, inheriting the abilities of both original balls. This can only be done once per pair of balls as the resulting fused ball is not eligible for fusions or evolution.
• The Infested: What The Maggot does, although with a few drops of The Virus in there. On contact the ball contaminates the enemy with maggots which, upon the unit's death, release baby balls with the same ability to infest. On its own it's alright but it can make some pretty great fusion material for applying other effects, such as Nuke infrsting the whole screen with the resulting baby balls exploding on contact.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • Deadeye's Cross is an evolution which combines all four directional dagger items. As the game's only four-item evolution it's prohibitively difficult to obtain, but when fully leveled it turns all your hits into Critical Hits.
  • Deadeye's Impaler takes this up to eleven. It's only obtainable by fusing the aforementioned Cross with the Gracious Impaler (itself a fusion of Reacher's Spear and Deadeye Amulet). It reduces the crit chance to 10 percent, but it guarantees that any crit will insta-kill anything that isn't a boss.
• Last Chance Hit Point: The Vampiric Sword item costs some of your HP every time you fire a ball, but it will never reduce your HP to less than 1.
• Leaning Tower of Mooks: Enemies may appear stacked several units high. Units on the top can't be damaged until the unit below them is destroyed, making these very resilient foes.
• Life Drain: The Vampire ball has a chance to restore HP with every hit. Its evolutions offer even more powerful life-draining effects.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: If the items you're offered upon leveling aren't to your taste, you can reroll them. However, every reroll costs gold, and the cost per reroll rises significantly with every use. If you have the Gambler's Den in your town, you can get up to four free rerolls, and the Casino will reduce reroll costs.
• Macrogame: Every run, even the failed ones, contribute towards the game's meta-progression, ensuring that you gradually become stronger as you continue to play.
  • Any experience which a character collects during a run contributes towards their permanent character level. Each additional level increases the character's base stats for subsequent runs.
  • Any resources (gold, wheat, wood, stone) and blueprints collected during a run are retained, and can be spent in the town-building mode to construct/upgrade buildings. Many of these buildings provide gameplay benefits that will aid you in future runs.
• Mad Scientist: The Physicist is a prototypical mad scientist. He has wild hair, welding goggles, and his portrait is lit by the harsh blue glare of untamed electricity.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Pretty much every single character has unique mechanics associated with them, but the most stand-out are Cogitator and Radical (see Gameplay Automation), The Shieldbearer (with special shield that further brings gameplay similarities to "Breakout"), The Tiptoer (who can't be detected by enemies) and The Tactician (which makes battles turn-based).
• Mighty Glacier: The Iron ball deals twice the damage of a standard ball, but it travels 40% slower.
• Mini-Boss: Every level is divided into three equal parts, with mini-bosses marking the endpoints of the first and second sections. Mini-bosses are considerably more difficult than normal enemies, requiring sustained firepower to defeat and, upon reaching the bottom of the screen, keep damaging the player until defeated. When defeated, they drop a Fusion Reactor, along with several large experience gems and building blueprints (if you still lack any).
• Money Sink: The final set of buildings you can unlock all give an increasingly higher boost to your stats and can all be leveled up infinitely.
• Monochromatic Eyes: The playable characters have pitch black eyes, giving them a faintly menacing appearance.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: The Brood Mother ball resembles a chitinous insect with a swollen stomach. It has a chance to spawn baby balls on each hit.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: The Matchmaker building has limits on who can partner up, not allowing any combination that would be redundant (Like Cogitator x Radical) or too powerful (Like Repentant with ether Flagellant or Shield bearer).
• New Game Plus: Completing the main game opens up New Game + mode levels, where the enemies have increased stats.
• Nuke 'Em: Combining a Bomb (Fire x Iron) and Poison grants you the Nuclear Bomb. It causes a massive mushroom cloud explosion that deal incredible damage as well as irradiating all foes on screen.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The Black Hole ball instantly vaporizes the first non-boss enemy it touches. It has a long Cooldown period to counterbalance its powerful effect.
  • The Reaper ball has a 15% chance of killing any enemy it hits, including bosses.
  • Some items can also empower you to kill in a single hit:
    • With the Voodoo Doll, whenever an enemy would become cursed it may instead die outright.
    • The Gracious Impaler has a chance to turn critical hits into insta-kills.
    • The Kiss of Death has a chance to kill enemies that recover from being Charmed.
    • The Odiferous Shell has a 50% chance of instantly killing an enemy when it touches you.
• Patchwork Map: An unconventional vertical example - the first six layers consist of what seems to be a forest, ice biome, huge desert, fungal grove, grasslands and volcanic plains, all coexisting without problems from close distance of each other. Justified in that the Pit as a whole is Eldritch Location created by abnormal celestial object.
• Power-Up Magnet: Characters have the natural ability to hoover up items in their immediate vincinity. The Magnet power-up increases the item attraction radius. The Magnet Factory building will give everyone a permanent increase to their radius.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The character roster includes simple citizens (like Cohabitants and Empty Nester), soldiers (such as Warrior, Embedded and Shieldbearer), assasins (like Shade and Tiptoer), religious people (like Repentant and Flagellant) and more out-of-pocket occupations (like Juggler, Spendthrift and Physician). Justified since the titular pit is said to attract all kinds of people who'd pursue its riches.
• Retraux: The game's visual design is based on early 3D console graphics and by default applies a visual filter to simulate the appearance of playing on a CRT monitor. The core gameplay itself is also a variant of the classic Breaking Out genre which dates back to 70's arcades.
• Satan: Satan is one of the highest-level evolutions in the game created via fusing the Incubus (Charm x Dark) and Succubus (Charm x Vampire). Literally just the Prince of Darkness in ball form.
• Shifting Sand Land: The third zone, THE LIMINAL x DESERT, is a sandy area filled with desert flora such as cactus and agave. The enemies include sand lizards, cobras, and locusts.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: SNOWY x SHORES is a frozen area with icy patches that you automatically slide across if you step on them. Balls shot across the icy patches also speed up for a bit for same reason.
• The Six Stats: Player characters have six stats which closely align with the classic six-stat system.
  • Endurance affects your Hit Point total.
  • Strength influences your base damage.
  • Leadership affects both the quantity and damage of baby balls.
  • Speed affects how quickly both you and your balls move.
  • Dexterity improves Critical Hit chance and fire rate.
  • Intelligence affects the power of AoEs, status effects, and passives.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Twisted Serpent is the final boss of THE LIMINAL x DESERT. It's a gigantic mechanical snake which shoots poisonous spikes from its body, and lasers from its mouth.
• Status Effects: There are a plethora of status effects to be inflicted on your foes, ranging from the expected (frozen, burning, poisoned) to the unusual (irradiated, lovestruck, infested). Certain enemy attacks can also freeze, burn, or poison the player.
• Succubi and Incubi: Two evolved balls are Succubus (Charm x Vampire) and Incubus (Charm x Dark). Both appear as a ball with a fanged maw, but the Succubus has the traditional devil's horns and tail while the Incubus has a single horn in the center of its forehead and two small bat wings.
• Theme Naming: Every stage's title is in the format of "FIRSTWORD x SECONDWORD".
• Unwinnable by Mistake: The very first level can become this for the Physicist, as the Skeleton King can only be hit from the sides and rear but the Physicist can't angle their shots that far. If they don't have a ball that can pass through enemies they're (almost) completely screwed.^*It's still possible to win by clipping balls through the Skeleton King's face by waiting for them to speed up as they bounce around, but this takes an exceptionally long time.
• Version-Exclusive Content: Twitch integration — and the associated False Messiah character — are exclusive to the PC version of the game.
• Weaponized Offspring: The Mosquito King and Mosquito Swarm balls create mosquitos that then attack random enemies. Similarly, the Brood Mother can "birth" a baby ball on impact while the Spider Queen can generate Egg Sac balls.
• Wolf Pack Boss: The boss of FUNGAL x FOREST, Shroom Swarm, is a whole group of mushroom enemies that all share one health bar. They also have unique appearances compared to enemy mushrooms.