There are few joys in gaming as pure as bouncing a series of balls against a target. From Pong to Breakout, Holedown to Nubby’s Number Factory, the core appeal is always the same: the act of firing a bouncy sphere into a cluster of breakable objects that shatter as your projectile violently ricochets between them feels properly brilliant.

Few games understand this carnal desire as much as Ball X Pit, releasing today for all major platforms. Developed by Kenny Sun and published by Devolver, the game became a talking point over the summer thanks to the winning combination of a generous demo and an unusually focused marketing push by Devolver, who devoted a whole presentation to it at the height of this year’s Not-E3. There was a feeling that Devolver knew they’d signed something special, and, well, it turns out they had. Ball X Pit is phenomenal, and easily one of the best games of the year.

Here’s the setup, in case you’re unfamiliar: a cataclysmic event destroys an entire civilisation, leaving only an enormous, gaping pit in its place. You play as several opportunistic treasure hunters who set up camp alongside the pit, venturing into its depths in search of loot.

With your character positioned at the bottom of the screen, rows of enemies move towards you from the top. If they manage to make it all the way down, they’ll attack, inflicting damage if you can’t break them in time. You fire balls (either manually or automatically) at them to prevent this from happening, altering the angle of your shots to inflict the most damage possible. Monsters are all comically squeezed into rectangular boxes, allowing you to use their angled edges to bounce balls into harder-to-reach corners of the board. If you’re finding that hard to picture, imagine Breakout, but all the blocks are possessed and you can shoot multiple balls.

Balls are split into two types. The first, special balls, either have a specific gimmick (such as being able to pass through enemies, or split into multiple balls upon impact) or inflict a status effect on an enemy, such as burn or freeze. Baby balls, on the other hand, are simple damage dealers that you gain a stack of at the start of each run.

A roguelite, Ball X Pit allows you to upgrade your balls (I’m not a fan of how I’m being forced to phrase things here!) by levelling up during a run. You’re presented with three options each time, a mixture of special balls and passive items that augment your character and alter their playstyle. Occasionally, enemies will drop a swirling anomaly that allows you to fuse special balls into a single wild and powerful combo.

Of course, a roguelite is only as good as its synergies, and the possibilities on offer here are excellent. Focus on baby balls, and you’ll soon be peppering enemies with hundreds of tiny damage dealers that decimate rows in seconds. Combining balls that cause – let’s say – bleed and poison with another that has a wide area of effect allows you to take out trickier opponents with a single shot. Mash that Frankenstein sphere together with a passive item that sees your balls sail through enemies without bouncing, and you can inflict plague across entire armies of tumbling square-shaped baddies with ease. It’s intoxicating stuff.

It helps that it feels electric in the hands: the tiny controller vibration when balls collide, the numbers that fly out of demons when your balls become trapped between them (sorry), and the way enemies begin to chant as they approach your character at the bottom of the screen. Clearly, the developer spent considerable time polishing this, and it shows.

Nowhere is this clearer than back at your base, a patch of land you return to between runs. Buildings, unlocked by defeating bosses, can be built here, as well as farms and forests that can be harvested for resources. But ah! Here’s the magic! Buildings are constructed and resources are harvested by gathering up your characters and firing them into your base like the balls you launch in the game proper, elevating what could have been a basic upgrade screen into a secondary game mode that utilises that same core action within a completely different context. As you can only shoot your citizens once following each run, you’ll find yourself constantly shifting buildings and resources around in an attempt to make it count as much as possible. Then it’s back into the pit to try out new characters, or to harvest more resources, each layer feeding into the other to create a rich and compulsive loop. It rips.

There’s a lot more I could enthuse about – how each character feels completely different, for example, thanks to inventive, unique abilities – but even after playing it for ten hours, I feel like there’s still a lot here for me to unpack. More levels. More synergies. More buildings for the meta layer. I genuinely can’t wait to dive in deeper.

Don’t miss this one.