What happens if you cross Peggle with an idle game like Adventure Capitalist? Why you get Pegidle of course! This wonderous mash up of ideas has snuck up upon me when I’ve had only a few minutes to game in the margins of a busy evening. It is addictive and ultimately quite satisfying to watch as the pachinko inspired idle game wracks up the stats before you.
At the start of your game you’ll have a peg board and a shooter to fire a ball out of. Just like Peggle, you’ll be aiming to hit the pegs and clear the board. At the bottom of the screen a moving bucket can also catch your ball but instead of giving you your ball back, it gives you cash. Cash can also be made by hitting golden pegs. Soon you’ll have enough money to upgrade the ball to generate more cash per bucket and golden peg hit, or add more balls to your inventory to fire them off at will. The key upgrade for your ball though is auto drop. At this point the a new ball of that type will randomly drop from the top of the screen every three seconds. You can pay to upgrade the auto drop to drop a ball faster and that is recommended as the quicker you clear peg boards, the more money you’ll earn. This in turn means you can unlock the next ball which generates more of the same thing.
Alongside cash you’ll earn prestige points. This is where my Adventure Capitalist reference hits home. Once you earn enough prestige points you can wipe your current progress by “prestiging” and spending your prestige points on permanent upgrades. Initially these will be increasing your gold/money multiplier or the chance a golden peg or prestige peg will spawn. Later on you’ll unlock purple pegs, rainbow pegs and bomb pegs which bring additional perks, gain the ability to shoot multiple balls at once and earn starter bonuses so you can skip the earlier manual shooting portion. Shooting manually in addition to your auto drop is always the quickest way to earn money and prestige though, adding a nice element of player control and intervention into the mix.
There are ten levels of peg boards to buy through prestige points that get bigger and more complex in their layouts as you go. Ultimately they are more rewarding too but it’ll take a good 100 hours to get there. This is because the AFK gains when not actively playing or running Pegidle are so small that it forces you to just minimise the game instead as you do other things to speed up progression. It might take over a couple of days not playing the game to wrack up what you could do just leaving it minimised for 5 minutes and that feels a little too stingy. It really is my only gripe though as this is oddly satisfying to play – or at least watch. The cascade of 100 balls flying down and smashing hundreds of pegs is a lovely feeling.
I’m not usually a fan of idle games but Pegidle certainly kept me interested during its run. It is an interesting spin on the genre and I appreciated being able to actually play the shooting part of it and getting bonuses faster as a result. As always, your mileage will vary but this is one of the few idle games I have enjoyed.
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