Pinball Spire is a wonderful reinvention of what Pinball can be

There's been a few attempts to update Pinball into something new, and Pinball Spire is the latest that's out now. It's Steam Deck Verified and works great on desktop Linux with Valve's Proton. Note: my key was sent by the developer.

It's being called a pinballvania, because it takes some ideas from metroidvanias to provide a rather different experience for pinball fans and turns it into much more of an adventure. Developed by Apparition Games, a tiny indie game studio in Canada. What you get here is a rather unique blend of pinball, platforming and puzzles to make something quirky and different to spend your time with.

Pictured - Pinball Spire on Linux

What makes it quite different is that each main level in the game acts as a self-contained puzzle for you to solve, with the power of pinball. I'll be honest, pinball is a game I never really got. Like many others though, I did play plenty of Space Cadet in the early Windows days but other than that it never really appealed to me. However, Pinball Spire thankfully understands me and shows me there's another way to do it, one that's just far more exciting and mysterious.

Here you go into each new room not really knowing what to expect from it, and there's quite a lot of surprising variety in how you'll be dealing with each section. Thankfully, you've got a special scouter that you can hit a button to pause the movement at any time to look around and hover over objects to learn more, and hopefully get an idea on how to beat the room.

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There's definitely a little frustration that can be found though. Some parts of it seemed to take me forever, because I just couldn't hit a very specific spot. Other times you're left just waiting for the ball to drop, which can take a while in some cases. Basically, it has all the annoying bits of Pinball too, as well as all the exciting new additions to make it (to me) actually worth a go.

Thankfully, you're not just any old pinball, you have special abilities! Like being able to slow down time to line up a perfect shot (still not easy), but it gives you an actual shot line when you use the slow ability if the ball is over a flipper so you know exactly where it will fire. Seriously though, there's a few times I got worried I was smashing the keys on my keyboard a little too hard when desperately wanting to make a shot. Using these abilities takes up mana too, so you can't just use them all the time, which adds to the challenge of it all.

Features:

• Welcome to the world of Pinballvania! A fusion of arcade pinball mechanics with platforming, puzzles, and exploration—drawing inspiration from retro action-adventure games
• Elaborate pinball levels to explore, combining traditional pinball tables with atmospheric dungeons and passageways to explore.
• Mana-powered pinball abilities enable unorthodox ways to interact with the environment.
• Fun accessories to collect and equip to customize Pip’s appearance!

With the launch of Pinball Spire, solo developer Tom Voros said: "I hope players enjoy the atmospheric art and music as they journey through the Pinball Spire in this unconventional take on pinball action!".

It's a really unique experience not to be missed. Fantastic design and great audio to go with it make it a really fun game overall.

You can buy it from:

Fanatical

Steam

GOG (sometime "soon")