Since Balatro took the gaming world by storm, we’ve seen tons of games try to roguelike-ify (now a word, I promise) different parlour or seaside arcade games. Plinbo is the latest game to try this out, merging together pachinko (or plinko) pegboards with tarot cards for powers. It is a unique twist, but its staying power for each player will hinge on a couple of key game design decisions.
Each run in Plinbo asks you to earn a certain amount of money. Cross that threshold, and you’ll move to the next round. You’ll start off with a set number of balls, and they’ll bounce down the pegboard to reach a money multiplier box at the end. It is crucial to empathise that the player cannot directly impact the gameplay; Plinbo plays itself. There’s no physics in Plinbo. Instead, every bounce is a probability calculation, and whilst you may be able to tweak the probability of bouncing left or right sometimes, luck plays a huge role in the game. As your balls collect money, you’ll earn tickets, and these are your currency for upgrades and power-ups in the shop between rounds.
Plinbo has four things to play with. The first are challenges. You’ll always be presented with two, and most of them are percentage chances of something good happening, with a smaller chance of something bad. For example, a 75% chance of gaining 4 more balls per turn, but a 25% chance of losing a ball. That can apply to your ball value, too, which impacts the multiplier boxes at the bottom of the pegboard. Like the main event, these challenges feel a bit too out of your control, as you simply get a “well done” or “oh dear” message when you spend your tickets. More nuances are the tarot cards. These usually cost anywhere from 6 to 15 tickets and are the most expensive but limited purchases. These fundamentally alter the game, like a 25% chance of increasing your ball value for every ball launched, or giving you an extra token (an attempt to reach the round goal) once you hit 900 pegs. Initially, you’ll only have space for 6 tarot cards, but with careful planning, you can expand your tarot deck and layer their powers to create hugely beneficial combos. This is where most of the magic of Plinbo takes place.
Aside from tarot and challenges, each peg has three randomly assigned upgrades to it, and you can choose to unlock one of them. This is where you can change the bounce probability to the left or right by 15%, or add in cash bonuses or retriggers of tarot or ball powers. That’s helpful because the fourth upgrade you can tweak with is buying special balls with their own skills. Golden balls give 3 times more money. You can buy leftleaner and rightleaner balls that will also sway 15% more one way than the other. Echo balls have the chance to trigger pin effects multiple times. Some will turn a 0.25 cash multiplier into something much better. Again, this is where your player strategy will kick in. Pegs and balls are limited, so you might need to swap out previous purchases on the fly.
I’ve referenced this earlier in the review, but my main issue with Plinbo is that it felt slightly too hands-off for my personal preference. Yes, there are visual effects for throwing 40 balls down a pegboard and watching the number go up. Yes, I can see incremental fans enjoying the base gameplay of Plinbo. However, for me, I found myself getting locked into very specific difficulty spikes where I’d run out of room for tarot cards and new balls, and all my pegs were upgraded, and I had nothing else to do except keep refreshing the store to hope for something to open up. In the three stage layouts, this is less of an issue as they wrap up just as the problem sets in, but in endless mode, anything beyond round 20 felt a bit flat. Maybe I’m just missing a fundamental gameplay loop, but I’d run out of ways to progress, and was just waiting for luck not to fall my way so I could crash out. The only way I could continue was to lean into anything that gave a chance of ball respawns, and if you abuse that mechanic, you can almost create an infinite loop of balls and stay in the game for way beyond its shelf life. Plinbo feels better in tighter formats, and there are only three boards to play.
Whilst I admit Plinbo may not be for me, I can see plenty of decent ideas that have been well implemented, and I do think the wider incremental gamer community will sink a few hours into Plinbo and enjoy it. You’ll only enjoy it if you go in knowing there are no physics, and the player has no direct impact on the gameplay you see. This is a tweak-it-and-watch game, and I think the marketing makes it out to be something more involved than it is. Possibly the most generous 7 out of 10 I’ve given in a while, as I think with some tiny rebalancing, this will be good.
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