I do love watching numbers go up, and I do love building up ridiculous combinations – Splatchinko is a chaotic space roguelike pachinko out now. Disclosure: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.
Having played quite a few pachinko inspired games, with one of my favourites being Peglin, I was keen to see what another developer could do with their own spin on it. I’m not going to bury the lead for you here – it’s really good. Silly, over-the-top and the whole story is just downright ridiculous but it’s seriously charming too.
In Splatchinko, you take charge of an omnipotent, world-devouring entity from the dawn of time. After hanging up your planet-chomping chops to settle down with the love of your life, disaster strikes: a mysterious cosmic threat with a great big mouth kidnaps your beloved! Armed with a real freaky, customizable array of detachable, mutating eyes – it’s up to you to blast your way across collapsing galaxies to get them back.
Yep, it’s all about shooting your eyes through space, to smash through pegs and devour everything in your path until you can find your beloved. Wait, whose the good guy here? Are we also the baddies? Oh my.
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How it actually works – you fire a specific eye of your choice from your deck of eyes across the space board of pegs, each time your eye hits a peg it gets a certain amount of power added to it. This increases constantly as your eye bounces around space hitting other types of pegs, to eventually explode on the planet in front and deal damage.
What you get with Splatchinko is a curious mixture of turn-based strategy with physics-defying pinball mechanics. It’s all about building up the best combination you can do, to make each eye-ball shot count to see your attack number just keep going up and up to explode everything. There’s hundreds of different eyeballs to use with various different boosts like splitting in two or three, along with various different mutations to attach to your creature as you smash through the galaxies.
Each time you win, you then select a node on the map to move to the next one. It could be another battle, a mini-game, a random event and more. In some ways, the game can be quite wonderfully broken down because of how stupid a build you can end up with. That’s part of the joy of it!
See the launch trailer below:
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- Master pachinko-inspired tactical combat. Chain bounces across peg-filled battlefields to amplify damage, set off chain reactions, and break gravity.
- Build your alien run-by-run with 100+ eyes and 70+ mutations, capable of altering bounce behaviour, status effects, and special abilities.
- Navigate branching procedural maps packed with neurotic planets, third-contact alien encounters, high-risk events, shops, and aggressive boss fights.
- Stack mutations, exploit the shape of every board, and turn bad builds into lost love-saving winning runs.
Created by Stupidi Pixel, an indie studio based in Milan, founded by Fabio Taurisano, a tech artist and developer who is building Splatchinko as a solo dev: design, code, pixel art and animation, music. The studio’s motto: “if we didn’t have stupid ideas, we wouldn’t have fun games” and I certainly appreciate that.
Played on Linux with Proton 11, it has been a great experience. Runs well, looks great and no obvious bugs encountered to sour the experience. I’ve had a lot of fun blasting through this one to see what kind of stupidity you can cause. Surprisingly challenging too, the bosses have repeatedly kicked my ass.
I think my only real complaint is that I wish there was more meta-progression. There’s a few extras you can unlock from the menu after a round but not a whole lot. Still, there’s plenty there already to be enjoyable – I’m just greedy and always want more, especially when I enjoy it so much.
Thoroughly enjoyable, doesn’t take a lot of brain power and just good wholesome fun. The sound effects and music are completely silly too – in the best possible way. That and the random little voice-overs made me chuckle constantly. It’s so thoroughly absurd. Splatchinko is a game where minutes easily turn into multiple hours and ever other responsibility you have just fades away into the background, with your mind transfixed on blowing up more planets. Probably the most absurd pachinko styled game I’ve played yet.
Another developer to go right into my watch list, can’t wait to see what they do next.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
