Pachillinko

I did not plan to leave a review, but after playing for several hours and reading some negative ones - I've decided to leave my own, because I believe potential buyer can misunderstand main idea of this game, as those reviews did..

So about the game… well.. in a way pretty unique concept if you are not expecting classic IDLE game.. and you should not expect that here.

Game has IDLE elements.. yes.. but those are more like spices for the main dish - they add extra flavour to the main concept of the game which is already flavoured in unique way. From my point of view (based on several hours spent playing and developer's game description) - main dish is the vibe itself. You have pachinko-like falling balls (automatic dispatch amount is based on appropriate upgrade) that are bouncing off pins, while having bunch of different neon elements moving, thus adding relaxing dynamic to the game. And I believe that the music choice (synthwave micro genre of electronic music) is perfect ingredient of "main dish".

Target audience:
Game is not for you if you expect:

• pure IDLE game
• classic Pachinko simulator

Game is for you if you expect:

• straightforward gameplay
• meditative atmosphere

PS: pretty good Plinko simulator. But based on price of Plinko balls it is in a way an endgame part of the gameplay.

Originally had a negative review, but the dev immediately pushed an update that fixed nearly all of my complaints. Awesome job!

As a warning to potential buyers, there are NO pachinko elements at all - no slot/bonus wheel, no bonus buckets hanging around the board that require skill to get to, and speaking of skill - you don't shoot/launch the balls. This is just multi puck/ball plinko.

I love Pachinko games, they take me back to a simpler time when I was a child. My grandparents used to take me on vacation twice a year and often took me to penny arcades where I'd be given a handful of pennies to spend on the various slot machines. My favourite was a type of Pachinko machine where you'd flip a lever sending a ball bearing onto a maze of steel columns. If you got your ball to land in the smallest receptacle at the bottom you'd get more free balls. You could reclaim the money you initially spent on the game and win more depending on how many balls you'd won; however, it was a game you inevitably lost all of your money on as it was so addictive.

Over the years I've purchased the odd game that was reminiscent of those machines, for example Peggle, Peggle Nights, Dachinko and others such as the online versions Hamster Roll and Neko Pachinko.

When I found Pachillinko on sale over the 2022 Christmas sale with 90% off I grabbed it immediately without even bothering to research the game as it brought back all those nostalgic memories of my early childhood.

Anyway, after only five days since purchasing the game, I've already invested almost 60 hours in the game, some of it running in the background while I play other games. It got to a stage where I downloaded an auto-clicker (which meant I wasn't able to play any other game on this computer while it was running) as some of the achievements seemed impossible to attain without it. I finally got the 100 000 Plinko balls after 59 hours of running the game, most of it automatically. That accounts for only a tenth of the number of balls I need to get the 1 million achievement just for the Pinko mode (i.e. running the game for 590 hours) and only 2% for the 5 million balls achievement (that's the Casual and Plinko mode combined); which, would mean I'd need to run the game with an auto clicker for almost 3000 hours just to complete all the achievements awarded in this game; which, I'm not prepared to do.

Overall, the game is very limited in what you can do, much like most clicker games, apart from maybe those RPG Dungeons and Dragons oriented ones like Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms.

What really spoilt it for me was that trying to run the game without interference is impossible because it crashes within 2 hours consistently and also crashes Steam at the same time (no other game I've ever played via Steam has done this).

Despite it's sale price I still feel a little cheated and definitely won't be investing any more time in the game. The developer did say back in June 2022 that they would try and find the issue, but as they mentioned that they never get the crash themselves, despite other Steam community members also getting the same issue as me, I doubt that will ever happen as they haven't come back with any news since their last update. The last regular update was May 2022 (v1.20) with a smaller update (v1.21) back in June 2022, with no word from the developer since; which leads me to believe they have now abandoned the issue and the game. Which is sad as I did think it had potential for further development.

I found an event log that tied in with all the crashes that linked the issue with the audio, and posted the details of the log in the game discussion forums in the hope the developer would have some clues as to what the issue was, but it was deleted (I assume by the developer) the following day (yesterday 6th Jan 23).