Pincremental

Has promise, but I think the game's ultimate flaw is that you do not, at any point, alter the board significantly. You add side blockers, multiplier zones, and automatic paddles, but that's it. Ultimately you're just watching a ball fall down into some pins over and over. It's more similar to pachinko than pinball. There are no upgrades to add new features to the board, which I think is the missed opportunity. I wanted to lengthen the board, add lanes and new pin zones, bumpers, etc. But there's none of that. Just number go up. Hoping this concept gets used to its fullest potential eventually.

It's not a great game, but it is a good game. For the price of free, it's a very good game. How's that for a confusing review?

Judge this as "an idle game with pinball aesthetics," and don't expect "a pinball game with permanent progression." Even taking this into account, I find too many problems to recommend it. It is a power virus. Progress requires the game is running and not minimized - you can put another window on top of it, but minimizing it will pause the game. Immediately on booting the game, Task Manager regularly reported it climbing from 2% GPU usage to 12% and on up to 20% - in a few seconds. Why? The game doesn't seem to do anything more than use a custom big numbers library and bounce a ball around. There isn't any traditional pause for catching up progress, and offline progress is pretty poor compared to many other idle games that do much more with fewer resources. Offline progress didn't do much, and it seems to just calculate bounces and income from leases - it didn't power any significant progress. Unless you want to leave it alone for hours at a time doing nothing, you probably will want to boost your progress by manually hitting the flippers, but this pinball board doesn't look or feel right. The ball has a little bit of random velocity added (hold it in one of the bumpers - it will bounce around a bit). At the same time, the ball feels dead - it appears to lose all momentum on hitting any surface, so you can forget your dreams of pulling off anything slick. You really don't have much control - flippers let you hit it into the middle of the bumpers, or into the sides where it will travel down the side chutes back to the flipper or a ball out. Anything else requires the random velocity to kick the ball somewhere else. The only score elements are five bumpers across the board and this doesn't ever change. If you get lucky, the ball will bounce into both multiplier zones on your first ball, and then back into the launch zone to get kicked out again...if you're really lucky it gets stuck bumping between three bumpers for a while in a V-shape before random velocity adjustments kick it out again. The only pro trick I discovered was dumbly mashing Shift+R to try and get a good launch and chain some hits before the ball rolled down the chute. Copy-pasted lyrics from The Who notwithstanding, there's no pinball wizardry on display here. Every time you prestige (and there seem to be 4 prestige layers) it looks like you have to go back to the manual pinball phase, which is really aggravating considering how bad and slow it is. To make matters worse, most of the first two prestige layers revolve around automating the pinball phase, which you promptly lose on moving to the higher layers! It makes the decision about choosing when to prestige seem mostly about how much pain you can tolerate - either grinding more prestige, or dealing with the manual labor afterward. I also see some other issues with the HTML-based interface. Getting HTML to scale properly on different resolutions is tough, but the design here seems especially wasteful, with a handful of options requiring a couple pages to scroll through. Some icons are round and mask bigger selection rectangles, while other commonly used buttons are small. Sometimes you will click for nothing to happen, or start dragging an icon instead of clicking. I also noticed unwelcome flickering around the edges of the interface when pulling up the Steam Overlay, which may have something to do with the very similar colors between the Steam Overlay default and the game colors.