Having family over for a full week means it's not appropriate to be spending hours on end in front of the computer. I'm not one to sit and stare at the TV for hours either so I decided to check out the Apple App Store to see if I could find some cool new games. I saw that Peglin, a roguelike I've been eyeing for a while, had a mobile version so I decided to give it a go.
Deckbuilder with a twist
A few summers ago I had a ton of fun playing Slay the Tower which is considered one of the best roguelike deckbuilders out there. That is more of a classic deckbuilder where you collect actual cards that you use in turn based combat.
In Peglin you don't collect cards but pachinko orbs that you use to play pachinko. These orbs have different stats and effects that come into play when throwing them down the pachinko board. Each peg hit contributes to your overall damage done to each enemy while there's a few special pegs that can do things like dealing area damage to all enemies or massively increasing single target damage by landing a critical hit. There's also pegs to refresh the board.
You also have relics that give you passive effects that can be quite game-changing. This reminds me a lot of Slay the Spire as the game is basically set up in the same way. You traverse the same kind of branching map with different events on it while collecting orbs for your collection and relics to change how the game behaves.
The game is quite hard and you'll need to build your orb collection quite carefully if you want to get far and eventually win. So far I've only made it to the third world where I got absolutely wrecked. It's probably going to take a while for me to progress further. At least until I get to know all the different orbs and relics so that I can create some good synergies. You'll want to balance your collection with not to many orbs but rather picking a few good orbs that go well together. That's when these games start to become the most fun. It's why I spent probably 60 hours playing Slay the Spire.
I'll probably be playing this a ton when I go to Oslo for the weekend and will be sitting around the airport. I considered buying the new Kingdom Rush game as well. I didn't know they had made a new one but I used to play the crap out of all the Kingdom Rush games back in the day. They're just the perfect tower defense games for mobile.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.