Ballionaire is annoyingly good and I want to play it all the time

Ballionaire from developer newobject and publisher Raw Fury scratches all the right places in my brain, and I want more of it. Note: key provided by Raw Fury.

We're certainly not short of excellent games right now are we? A time where the likes of Path of Exile 2 and Marvel Rivals are here, and I like them a lot, but what's been itching away at the back of my brain constantly has been Ballionaire. It's an itch that feels satisfying to scratch too. You know the kind where something is just burning, and so you have a good hard scratch on it and get that euphoric feeling after. That's Ballionaire — and someone is going to have to take it away from me soon or I'm going to get nothing done.

Ballionaire is a what they're calling an "autobonker", inspired by Pachinko machines originally from Japan. The idea is that you drop a ball down a vertical machine, and watch it bump into everything as it goes down. The fun part here, is that you're sticking all sorts of items onto the board to increase how much you earn from every ball you drop down. You can create some completely ridiculous combinations, and I can definitely see why Pachinko is popular. This has me hooked in something fierce.

It's "brain-tickling fun" the developer describes it as, and they're not wrong, I need more people to play it so they can tell me about the awesome boards they created with it to break the game and make lots of (fake) cash.

You need the cash too, because some weird Elders want a constant tribute, and you're playing the game to keep them all happy. Their demands just keep on increasing, and it's up to you to place down various items in such a way that will cause your balls to bounce about all over the place to create the most insane combinations you can.

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It will eat at your brain more than just the excitement of dropping balls and seeing what happens though, because there's actually a lot of strategy to it. While there's an element of randomness with the physics on where the ball will drop and bounce, there's tons and tons of items to place and unlock to build up all these combinations and quite a lot to learn on how they all work together. Some of the runs I've had in it have been absolutely nuts, balls flying all over the place as I just sit back and watch the fireworks.

Even the meta unlock system leans into the absurdity of it all, acting like one of those toy machines children beg you for a coin to drop some random crappy little toy. It gets you to insert your card, and down will drop a ball that allows you to pick an item to unlock. Love it.

If that intro wasn't clear enough: go and buy it. Ballionaire is excellent. This is going to be a game that I repeatedly go back to for one more run.

Curiously, it does have Native Linux support, but it's not actually advertised on the Steam store page. It's also Steam Deck Verified, which was tested by Valve on the Native Linux version.

The developer also mentioned proper modding and Steam Workshop integration is coming soon too. Can't wait to see what the community cooks up to add into this one.