I think one of the most relatable bad habits of the current era is doom scrolling.
You know the cycle. You hop into bed, intending to sleep. But instead of getting proper rest, you fail to resist the allure of that glowing slab on your bedside table. Just a few minutes on Reddit, a few tweets here and there, perhaps I’ll even check the news. An hour later, you’re mired in existential dread, immersed in compounding fears about a world that feels out of control and increasingly chaotic.
Ball x Pit is available now on Xbox as well as Steam, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. It’s also up on Xbox Game Pass, which gave me the opportunity to check out this mildly viral ball-bouncing bonanza.
Little did I know it would be the catalyst that completely changed my gaming habits.
Combined with the Xbox Ally’s bed-friendly ergonomics and convenience, Ball x Pit is a pixel 3D-styled game that runs perfectly on lower-end systems and is excellent for bursts of gameplay. Ideal for pre-sleep rituals that totally preclude mental health-battering doom scrolling with mental health-promoting ball play.
What do you even do in Ball x Pit?
In Ball x Pit, you play with balls. Many thousands of balls. Balls of all shapes and sizes, many of which have magical powers.
When I was a kid, one of the ways I used to access games was via PC demo discs found on the cover of magazines. It was here I found myself addicted to a Breakout-style game called DX Ball. The premise here is simple: fire off a ball, and bounce it with a mouse-controlled paddle and wipe out all the blocks. Ball x Pit takes that concept to an all-new level.
Combining Breakout with Vampire Survivors and a dash of Loop Hero, Ball x Pit is a roguelike ball bouncing block breaking extravaganza. In the game, you collect a variety of quirky, slightly gothic characters with gorgeous 3D pixel-style art. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and comes with a unique ball-throwing style that can shape how you approach builds.
Indeed, every level throws out random enemy blocks that have a variety of their own skills and powers. As you break them, you level up Vampire Survivors style, and can kit yourself out with a collection of special balls that can infect, burn, bleed, and blow up your enemies in glorious, chaotically cascading fashion.
Every few levels, you’ll see power-ups spawn that even allow you to merge and evolve ball combinations, encouraging you to experiment. Each new combo is unlocked in a codex and makes it easier to rediscover on subsequent runs. You can create swarms of mosquitoes, a spreading noxious plague, or even a nuclear missile — and sending them forth only amps up the visual chaos and ball-smashing satisfaction.
As each level progresses, enemies get gradually stronger too and culminate in boss fights along the track. Knowing what each boss’s abilities are may shape how you build your character for that run, as each has its own strengths and, occasionally, immunities that guide build crafting creativity.
Ball x Pit is a roguelike, truly, too. As you progress, you’ll find a variety of resources that can be used to develop and maintain a homestead, similar to Loop Hero. Buildings can be upgraded and synergized with each other, giving your characters bonuses to stats, including damage dealing, defense, speed, and so on. It makes each run all the more rewarding, and even when you log in, new resources are waiting for you, having been harvested while you were offline.
I’ve already sunk like 10 hours into the game so far, and there are still pages of characters, buildings, and levels I have yet to unlock. Re-doing levels with different characters on higher speeds keeps the game feeling fresh, and new levels unlock new buildings and new power-ups to discover and combine. It’s like crack in video game form, in the best possible way.
Ball x Pit arrived at the perfect time for me. Its launch coincided with the drop of the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, the former of which isn’t particularly great for high-fidelity AAA games. Ball x Pit is incredibly well optimized, and its 2.5D stylings make it a great candidate for low-power, maximum-battery-life Steam Deck or Xbox Ally gaming.
Usually, when I go to bed, I end up doom-scrolling Reddit, X, or Instagram before falling to sleep amidst a mild existential crisis. The Xbox Ally’s “Full Screen Experience” with Windows 11 and the Xbox app isn’t precisely polished or feature-filled (yet), but it does let you jump into games as quickly as a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck will, once you’ve got it all set up.
Given Ball x Pit’s heavily optimized gameplay and Xbox Play Anywhere status (it’s also on Xbox Game Pass), I’ve found my gaming habits extend away from the TV more and more. I’ve replaced my late-night doom scrolling with trips to the Ball x Pit and the Xbox Ally.
Ball x Pit, I’d argue is an unexpected game of the year contender in a year dominated by absolute bangers.
Before this, I had a Lenovo Legion Go (now replaced with the superior Lenovo Legion Go 2, see our review), which is a great device — but it’s not the most ergonomic to use in bed. The Xbox Ally is lighter, more comfortable to hold across long sessions, and the updates to Windows 11 make it far less choring to set up and get going simply. The Xbox Ally gets you into and out of a game much more rapidly, and when the updates roll out to the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go later this year, those devices will reap the same benefits.
Ball x Pit really made me realize how much of a potential win Microsoft has on its hands here, but it really needs more games of this caliber hitting Xbox Play Anywhere. You can run Ball x Pit on the Xbox Ally’s lowest power settings, easily hitting 4-5 hours of battery life. It’s also an excellent game for Xbox Cloud Gaming, too, if you have that set up with your phone and something like the Razer Kishi V3.
There are a lot of games on Xbox Play Anywhere that hit 2D or 2.5D, but not enough that are hitting the quality bar of Ball x Pit here. Ball x Pit, I’d argue, is an unexpected game of the year contender in a year dominated by absolute bangers.
So, forgive me for glazing it here, but it really is the first game that made me realize just how much the Xbox Ally has already changed my Xbox gaming habits for the better.
Users who prefer and feel more invested in the Xbox ecosystem have a serious answer to the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch now, and Microsoft should triple down on acquiring content that targets this new device category. And it has a ton of catching up to do.
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