Note: If you are squeamish about eyeballs, this might not be your game!
To begin with, you’ve got to know that most of my pinball experience is from the Jungle Pinball minigame in Timon and Pumbaa’s Jungle Games (1995). And while I did sink ungodly amount of hours into that game, I’m definitely not a pinball expert.
Just hit the ball, man
Cult of Pin was created by Kenny, a game developer from Scotland, who runs his solo projects under the studio name KennyMakesGames. It is a gothic whimsical variant of your regular pinball game, in the same vein as Pinstripe, American McGee’s Alice, or the works of Tim Burton. The main idea is that you play pinball and as usual, hit stuff on the playfield (shocker, I know), but with the addition of boss encounters and roguelite elements. So besides racking up points, you’ll also be building your damage stats to fight enemies. To help you out, there are missions, rituals, mana and glyphs that you can collect and use during gameplay.
You will be collecting mana, again, by hitting stuff. Mana is the currency used in the shop. Being a pinball game, you will have to hit the Shop target on the table to visit it. You can then spend your mana on glyphs to help you on your journey. These are effects, ranging from making your mana the base for your damage, to making it easier for you to save a pinball from dropping down the drain. You can have a max of 10 glyphs at the same time, and most of the time you’ll need all 10 of them. I haven’t found the killer combo yet, but I’m pretty sure there is some synergy in the game that allows you to win with only 4-5 glyphs.
Moving on to the missions, there are three types: ramp, target or lane. Completing these multiple times will lead to triggering a ritual, which is a powerful damaging effect for the whole table, like hitting all enemy bumpers with high damage. Rituals are colour coded, so it’s easy to follow which mission to aim for next to activate your targeted ritual. Completing ramps and lanes are easy enough, but with the target missions I had some trouble, even though you can switch the activated targets around by using the flippers.
And speaking of enemy bumpers, there is a cluster of them on the table that you have to destroy. In the middle of the cluster sits an altar, that you have to hit a certain amount of times to unlock or upgrade your rituals. Destroying the enemy bumpers lets you fight with the given table’s Boss, a bigger enemy bumper with tentacles shielding it. The shield starts out squishy, so you can hit it to make tentacles retract to have a chance to hit the boss, but as you progress, some tentacles become solidified, preventing you from an easy access. It’s a nice addition to the difficulty curve, though the last phase usually puts the solidified tentacles right in front of your flippers and that makes the fight more tedious. To make it more interesting, the bosses have several different attacks, like repelling the ball or tilting the whole table. After beating them you will encounter either blessings or curses to further change the gameplay. To unlock new tables you have to win six runs, referred to as “acts” in the game.
Cool moments, coherent theme
Like with many pinball games, you can nudge the table here too. But as a welcomed design choice there’s no tilt, so nudging the table too many times doesn’t lock you out from play. Instead, your nudge has a cooldown to prevent you from spamming it. You can use arrow keys with the nudge for better control, but I just ended up smashing the general nudge button whenever in need, and it worked out 95% of the time.
To help you even further, there are 3 friendly bumpers to block the main ways to the drain. They are not forever though, they have their own health just like the enemy bumpers. It’s a nice touch in terms of difficulty (especially on later levels), and some glyphs are synergyzing with them as well. I lost more pinballs by sinking them in the side chutes than I care to admit even with the help of the friendly bumpers. I lost even more just by mistiming a hit with a flipper, and backwards-powerhitting the ball straight into the drain. But when you seem to be losing a ball, there is a chance to save it with a well-timed nudge, and gosh dang, hitting that is such a satisfying experience.
Coming back to the squeamish statement at the beginning, all bumpers in the game are actually eyes. Switching them from the usual style for this more distinct one is a great choice, it’s striking and gives the game character, and with their Cthulhu-like tentacles, the bosses feel threatening enough that you feel the urge to fight them.
A little side note: during my first few rounds of playing I used my mouse as the controller, which is a Xiaomi Mi Dual Mode Wireless Mouse Silent Edition. It has a thing, where if you hold down both the left and right buttons for around 5 sec, it resets itself and in turn disconnects too. So after figuring this out the hard way (i.e. trying to cradle multiple balls on the left and right flippers for more than 5 seconds and then consequently losing all of them at the same time), I switched to a gamepad instead.
Conclusion
Cult of Pin can be addictive. The first time I was going to try it, it turned into a 45 minute session, and that was only because I had to leave for something. It has a very satisfying game feel. The beep, boops and clunks are all there and the controls give a nice, tactile feeling. But I can also see it getting repetitive after a while, even with the roguelite elements. If you never played a pinball game before, I think this is a nice starting point to jump in.
