Video Game / Peglin

The dragons have been popping Peglins and stealing all of your gold for as long as you can remember. Enough is enough.

Peglin is a "Pachinko Roguelike" inspired by Peggle and Slay the Spire, in which you play as a titular Peglin on a quest to slay the dragons plaguing their kind. They venture through the Forest, Castle and finally the Lair in order to achieve this goal, fighting a plethora of enemies along the way in a unique form of turn-based combat where attacks are decided by the kind of Orbs the player drops onto a pachinko board. Each Orb has its own unique properties and boards can take any number of wild, abstract shapes populated not just by normal and sloped pegs, but special critical hit pegs, pegs that refresh the board, bombs and more.

The game was developed and published by Canadian studio Red Nexus Games. It was released in Early Access in April 2022.

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Peglin contains examples of the following tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: The orbs that the player Peglin can find are all inherently a bit strange as far as weapons go, being spherical ammunition that is either hurled into enemies directly or used to conjure some kind of magic spell, but within this category we can see anything from:
  • Completely normal stones of varying sizes.
  • Knives encased in transparent balls (that disappear when thrown to leave just the blade within, like a gacha prize).
  • Raw elements such as fire, ice and lightning congealed into a physical orb that the Peglin can 'catch' from sources of said elements.
  • And many more. It seems as though there are no limits on what an Orb can or cannot be, leaving the playing field open for new additions as the game continues through it's Early Access towards eventual full release.
• Action Bomb: Sappers are corrupted Peglins one can find in the Caves. They constantly advance, and if they get to your player, they'll detonate, doing a good chunk of damage on their way out.
• After-Combat Recovery: By default, a wounded Peglin can choose to patch themselves up by 20% of their maximum health after a battle (though this does set you back 25 gold and can only be done once before moving on). In addition, after fighting a boss at the end of a floor, their health will be completely restored. However, Cruciball levels peck at both of these aspects, nerfing the after-battle heal to only 15% and the after-boss heal to only 50%.
• All-or-Nothing Reloads: Reloading can only happen when you're out of balls, since otherwise you'd be able to abuse the various relics that only work while reloading. Reloading is also a free turn for your foes, however, so having a small "deck" of balls is a very bad idea without said relics.
• Anti-Hoarding: On the other hand, taking every single orb the game offers you after a battle is naturally a bad idea, since it's highly unlikely you'll be able to level them all up enough to be useful in endgame, hence clogging up your inventory with a mishmash of weak attackers. In addition, there's a selection of useful relics that only activate when reloading, which won't happen often if you're toting around a dozen balls or more.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: A fully upgraded Worbhammer can smash through enemy shields, and a level 2 Worbhammer or any Infernorb melt through shielded pegs on the board.
• Attack Reflector: Mirror enemies have this in effect for any attack that doesn't kill them outright. While it's not 1:1 (as due to Health/Damage Asymmetry, this would almost certainly kill the Peglin), fail to kill them and you're in for a bruising. Thankfully, this only works on thrown projectiles, but have fun trying to get past their resistance to aimed orbs.
• Badass Adorable: The Peglin meekly starts out with a handful of stones and a single knife to defend themselves with, scrapping with slimes, bats and the occasional spitting plant. By the time they reach the Castle and onward, however, you're likely to be seeing them slinging elemental magic, dropping giant obelisks from the sky and raining explosive ordinance on any unlucky monsters that stand in their way.
• Brutish Bulls: One of the Forest bosses is an aggressive minotaur who can hit for a fifth of your Peglin's max health.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • The Orblation will always cause self-damage on use, with the tradeoff being that it's aimable and hits hard.
  • The Nosforbatu causes a lot of self-damage... remedied at least in part due to it healing at least as much as it hurts your foes.
  • The Bullyball has this by proxy: its damage goes up every time self-damage is caused.
  • The treasure Wand of Skulltimate Power doubles your damage outright, but at the cost of causing a small amount of damage with every so-many pegs hit.
• Cast from Money:
  • Peglinero's Pendant will cause each gold collected from the field to count towards damage for that shot, same as hitting a peg alone. The Swashbucklorb works much the same way, albeit only for itself.
  • The Molten Mantle hits the targeted foe for the damage currently on the shot for every two coins collected, with the drawback that you can no longer collect money to spend.
    • Also counts as a particularly strong example of Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards.
• Chain Lightning: The Ball Lightning evokes this by "chaining" out to a peg near the one actually hit, hitting and activating it as well. Upgrading it increases the number of pegs chained per hit.
• The Corruption: The Peglins found in the Mines are clearly... not right, and most of them have crystals growing on them. The smaller ones are mad enough to detonate themselves as an attack on you, and one of the bosses of the area, the Super Sapper, is an immobile bomb-spewing abomination.
• Critical Hit: Involves a modicum of skill, as obtaining a critical hit necessitates hitting a yellow peg with an exclamation point on the field. Each orb has a "standard" damage value and a "crit" damage value, and the applicable one is multiplied by the number of pegs activated to produce the base damage. Funnily enough, getting a crit isn't always a good thing; the Extra-Orbinary does less damage on crit, and it's possible to set up a build that adds more to the base damage than the crit damage could ever hope to be.
• Critical Status Buff:
  • Monster Training doubles a player's damage output when their health is at 25% or less.
  • The Knife's Edge makes every shot a Critical Hit while a player's health is at 30% or less.
  • The Angry Tomahawk increases in strength the weaker the wielder gets.
• Cute Slime Mook: The first area, the Forest, contains green, blue and red slimes, with each colour in that order being stronger than the last. They're simple globs with beady eyes similar to the Peglin and inexplicably carry large swords with handles obscured by their bodies relative to the camera. They are largely non-threatening unless they manage to overwhelm the player and are fairly memorable due to almost always being the first enemy encountered by the player.
  • The forest has an additional variety with the Rainbow Slime, and crystalline slimes may now be found in the Caves.
• Damage Reduction: The Intentional Oboe relic reduces all damage taken by 1. It's not much at once, but it adds up.
• Deal with the Devil: In the Castle and Mines, a mysterious figure may offer "power" to the Peglin in a random event. Doing so costs half your maximum HP, but gives the Peglin the Infernal Ingot, which grants them the ability to steal one life point from a foe per five pegs hit.
• Death or Glory Attack:
  • The Omegorb hits hard and has Overflow, but will Nerf the pegs it hits so that even when refreshed, they do less damage than hit.
  • The Ohmygorb! is just as strong as the Omegorb and will hit everything on the screen... but every peg it hits is destroyed. Not just Hit—refreshing the board won't bring them back! It's a stylish way to end a battle, but be sure it's properly ended lest you run out of stuff to hit.
  • The Double-Edged Sworb is *extremely* powerful numerically, and has the additional bonus of refreshing the board when drawn. The drawback? For every peg restored to the board, the player is damaged. If a peg-dense board is mostly empty, having a Double-Edged Sworb in the deck is staring down the barrel.
• Dragon Hoard: If faced with the dragon for your final boss, he will be fought on a board where every peg shines with gold. By this point, since it's the end of the run, it just looks cool; but it can seriously backfire if you have any relics that make coins work for you in combat.
• Eaten Alive: In two forms.
  • The slime boss of the forest area will absorb the Peglin if it reaches them. This does not immediately kill the player, but instead moves their firing location from the sides of the playing field (which is in its likeness) to the inside of said likeness. However, this also ups its damage output, implying the act of digestion being in progress.
  • The Demon Wall boss of the castle area is preceded by two knight foes, menacing in their own right... but the first turn it gets off, its stony face will open its mouth into a door and take one of the knights into itself, leaving no trace. If it manages to get to the Peglin, their HP is set to -999.
• Equipment Upgrade: After a battle and in some events, the Peglin is offered a chance to upgrade one of their orbs. This generally increases the damage an orb does, or alters its abilities for the better. This maxes out at level III.
• Evil Doppelgänger: Starting in the Castle, random encounters may be had with a false Haglin. This fake is eerily not animated, speaks sssssstrangely, and takes a modest fee of HP.
• Fantastic Racism: Nothing that isn't a Peglin seems particularly kind to your Peglin, and the implication of the Castle event with the fellow Peglin disguised as a human implies that Peglin-human relations are sufficiently bad that humans will ordinarily refuse to allow a Peglin to even work for them.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The game happens to have these embodied with the Infernorb, Icircle, and Ball Lightning.
• Guide Dang It!: Red bombs are slightly bigger than black bombs and do 3x more damage than them, but they also damage the Peglin when they toss them to blow up their foes. This is not mentioned in any of the Relics or Orbs that give you red bombs; the game assumes you've figured it out for yourself by the time you've seen one of those bomb-providing things.
• Healing Boss: One of the four panels of the Quaballistic Ruins can heal itself and its cohorts, and the Super Sapper will tend to itself periodically.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: The wall chicken, a Shout-Out to the similar item in Castlevania, despite being preserved in chests, or various boss monsters, is still edible... Somehow.
  • One may ask similar questions of the Well-Done Steak, An Apple A Day, the Cookie, and the Pumpkin π.
  • Deconstructed with the Bad Cheese, which apparently reeks to the point that for every time you reload, more and more damage is dealt to your foes.
• Informed Equipment: Don't expect to see your Peglin wearing that Mental Mantle or carrying that Consuming Chalice.
• Interface Screw:
  • The Confusion condition will cause the player's aim to spin uncontrollably, meaning that the only thing a player can do is hit launch and pray.
  • The Bronze Rod and Lightning Rod will force the aiming reticle to themselves when they are present, meaning that any aimed orbs will hit them (and annoyingly do half damage). If you mostly have normally thrown orbs or crowd-hitters, this is an occasional annoyance, but if you have more of a focus on aimed orbs such as the Concentrication, it can be a hassle.
• Intrepid Merchant: From the shaded Forest to the interior of the Castle to the depths of the Mines, one may find Haglin peddling their wares, including both a variety of orbs and several low-tier relics...for a modest fee of coins. Question mark encounters may also have them offering a free sample.
• King Mook: The slime boss to the regular slimes is this, as is the living wall to its smaller, faceless miniboss counterparts.
• Large and in Charge: The strongest of the knight enemies in the Castle is a sort of captain taller than the player Peglin, let alone the other guards (who are unusually tiny, even compared to the player). These captains are reserved for rare single appearances in normal battles, more common appearances in miniboss rooms and as part of the giant living wall boss, where two will accompany it into battle.
• Lean and Mean: One of the Mines elites, notated as Slenderlin, is a very tall Peglin with gangly limbs who isn't exactly partial to your Peglin showing up, pitching things at them and occasionally buffing its attack.
• Life Drain: The implication of the Nosforbatu, which does damage equal to or greater than the amount you heal when launching it. (Though thankfully, if the damage it causes is greater than what is needed to kill the enemy, it'll still heal you as much as promised.) However, this is also capped by how much you heal... and yet at the same time, launching the Nosforbatu does self-damage. So one should be low on health, but not too low on health, while using it.
• Living Structure Monster: The Castle area is home to both Brick Slimes (cube-shaped stone slime variants with a powerful jump) and living walls (slow but powerful minibosses with large hands they use to slap the Peglin for a quarter of their default max health). There's also a giant living wall that acts as a boss, who, instead of a hand emerging from a wall, is a complete face with a functioning mouth.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me:
  • One of the relics, the Round Guard, is a buckler that will negate all damage taken while your Peglin is reloading.
  • Some knights in the Castle sport shields. While the technical health of the shields are low, they take half damage from your attacks.
  • Also in the Castle, some pegs are shielded, and at least one will be for every shield-bearing foe. These take several impacts to remove from play.
  • And to round it out, one of the elites in the Castle is a wizard who will transform some of your pegs into shielded pegs and, while not sporting a literal shield itself, gives itself Ballwark—a status with a shield that prevents hits below a certain damage from affecting it.
  • Certain orbs and relics may grant the player Ballwark in various quantities.
• Matryoshka Object:
  • The Matryorbshka has innate Multiball, with upgrades increasing that Multiball instead of per-peg damage. By its own power, a fully leveled Matryorbshka may split into 8 different balls on a single board.
  • The Matryoshka Shell grants Multiball to all balls, at the cost of docking damage per peg.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The 100 HP that the Peglin begins with can be reduced by either taking a Deal with the Devil or, less drastically, by leaping out of the way of an oncoming minecart and twisting their ankle.
• Metal Slime: Half-literal here. A Rainbow Slime with a high amount of health and set to move to ''exit" the arena may crop up alongside a parade of bats.
• Money for Nothing: Largely subverted. You may stumble upon treasure chests and elite enemies that provide relics, but basically nothing else in this game comes for free. The "pick one" reward system in Slay the Spire is reserved for free relics; everything else may be taken when offered, but for a significant price.
• Nothing Is Scarier: One miniboss encounter in the Mines seems to have nothing but a lightning rod... until throwing an orb reveals that there's something invisible right in front of the Peglin, followed by several more. That's not to mention that most of the pegs are invisible, save for refreshes, crits, and bombs. Oh, and individually aimable orbs can't hit these foes. Good luck!
• One-Hit Polykill: The essence of anything that has or grants Overflow. If it kills the first foe it hits, the remaining damage goes towards the next foe, and so on and so forth until either something takes the damage and lives or everything on that plane is wiped out.
  • This is also possible with anything given Piercing damage.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The dragon one may face towers over the Peglin, sporting golden scales to match its golden riches. It first inhales long and strong enough that the Peglin is sucked towards it, then breathes fire (which ignites some pegs, making them damaging to pop), and then swats it away to repeat the cycle. And apparently, they like to pop Peglins. Which isn't nice.
• Our Goblins Are Different: So far, 'Peglin' appears to just refer to the typical depiction of a green-skinned, large-eared goblin, seen in the player Peglin, the partially crystalized enemy Peglins in the Lair and the ethereal doppelganger NPC, implied to be a spectre of the player Peglin from an alternate timeline.
• Palette Swap: Common in regards to foes; the plants in the Forest return with more health, punch, and flair in the Castle, for instance. In Early Access, many foes in the Caves are simply shadowed versions of existing ones.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: A random encounter in the Castle is with a Peglin very poorly disguised as a human, wearing a mask and described as hiding their ears. The humans seem to be buying it, and if you rat them out, they seem genuinely surprised.
• Path of Most Resistance: Sure, the big red skull-and-crossbones foretelling the presence of an elite foe can seem intimidating, but managing to beat one will always net you a selection of 'rare' and generally higher-quality treasures, while going for a random chest has a split chance on offering you a rare or a common relic.
• Percent-Based Values: The Echo effect runs on this—a number is tacked to the Echo, and that number is the percentage of the damage the previous attack did that will be added to your current attack.
• Philosopher's Stone: Well, Refillospher's stone. Every time the board is refreshed, it adds two Gold to the pegs. It's not much, but the image implies it's only enough to fit on a ring, and hey—that's two more gold than you had before!
• Poison Is Corrosive: While the theming of Spinfection poses it as a poison, it does just as much damage to non-organic foes such as moving walls—which is significant, seeing as Bramble does not affect them.
• Poisoned Weapons: Spinfectious Sting is depicted as a dagger dipped in purple poison, and indeed inflicts Spinfection upon any foe struck by it.
• Power at a Price: Boss relics offer some great benefits, but if they don't come with an explicit drawback, there's a good chance they may not play well with how some pegboards are set up.
• Punny Name:
  • Every single Orb in the game is named after some kind of sphere-based pun relating to its characteristics, even the basic Pebball.
  • The game's achievements state that the mole boss is named Avogadro. In Chemistry, Avogadro's Number is used to calculate elemental entities, with one unit defined as a "Mole" (and has a value of 6.022 x 10^23, which is why the boss has 602 health).
• Red Filter of Doom: At low HP, the borders of the screen will pulse with a red vignette.
• Resting Recovery: A random event in the Forest may note that the weather is nice and sunny, and that it would be a nice place to rest. Doing so always heals 15 HP, but has a chance of ambushing you with an elite.
• Roguelike: The game's primary genre, with the pachinko and turn-based RPG elements acting as the means by which the player interacts with it rather than its structural basis. Each run sees the player Peglin starting out from the Forest, making their way into the Castle and then down into the Lair, where they seek revenge on the dragons that have wronged their kind. As a reward for an honourable attempt, starting a new run after dying will allow the player to choose from one of three Relics to start out with, giving an immediate headstart on each playthrough feeling fresh. In-universe, the alternate runs of the game are implied to be full-blown alternate timelines through which the Peglin will sometimes get a chance to peer into through breaks in reality or by interacting with the spectres of their doppelgangers across time and space.
  • On the other hand, there are some unlockables for subsequent runs; aside from the different starting characters acquired by earning very obscure Achievements, you can unlock Custom Games that let you start with anything you've used at least once in-game by winning for the first time, and you unlock the tier of Cruciball Mode directly above whatever Cruciball Tier you won at.
• Scratch Damage: Sorely averted. Many Orbs do zero damage at base. Some Orbs have "Deals no damage!" specified in their descriptions, which means that none of your status buffs or Relics will ever get it to do damage (unless you have it set off a bomb). On the other hand, the Peglin can also prevent foes from damaging them by acquiring sufficiently-high Ballwark.
• Shout-Out: Given how much it borrows from both Peggle and Slay the Spire, it's not surprising to see a few homages to both games.
  • The Unicorn Horn relic's increased length on the shot indicator is a reference to Bjorn Unicorn's Super Guide power, and the Jack-Orb-Lantern and Pumpkin π call back to Renfield Pumpkin's Spooky Ammo.
  • The layout of each map very much resembles Slay the Spire and its act system, and both refer to the items that affect the player's abilities as Relics.
  • The Sash of Focus references the Focus Sash from Pokémon. Both items will prevent its user from dying/fainting from a lethal attack, Though the Sash of Focus does not require the player to be at full health.
  • The Super Sapper boss battle is modeled after a game of Minesweeper, with bombs hidden within a grid and colored indicators showing where nearby unrevealed objects are.
  • The Hero's Backpack is a nod to Backpack Hero. Much like that game's item synergies, it boosts the strength of matching orbs that are next to each other in the queue.
  • Youtouber Aliensrock, who has done some significant gameplay coverage of the game got an artifact named after him, the Alien's Rock.
• Sinister Geometry: One of the bosses of the Mines is a set of four moving squares with intricate markings that consistently fires on the Peglin, buffs each other, and heals.
• Team Killer: One of the bosses in the Castle is a giant living wall that moves slowly and attacks by opening its huge mouth to swallow whatever's in front of it, resulting in an instant kill. Before this can ever happen to the player Peglin, however, it will always be shown off against one of the two large knight enemies that spawn alongside the boss on the first turn, warning the player of what might happen if they don't act fast. By using the Bramball to immobilize the other large knight, one can Set a Mook to Kill a Mook for extremely beneficial returns, opening up a clear path to attack the boss quickly.
• Technicolor Toxin: Things relating to Spinfection are usually purple.
• Temporal Duplication: The player Peglin can occasionally find hazy duplicates of themselves that they can borrow power from for upgrades. Once entering the Mines, stranger things can happen in those crystal halls...
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • A level 1 Doctorb heals the Peglin, something that can only be reliably done by sacrificing the opportunity to obtain or upgrade an Orb... but using it once removes it from your inventory. So it's common for a player to skip over it, at least until they upgrade it so that it can be used once per battle.
  • The Egg is big, heals the Peglin for 6 HP for each peg it hits, and does a lot of damage per-peg. However, it splats against anything that doesn't disappear upon contact with it; this means it behaves just like the Level 1 Doctorb, unless you manage to avoid shields, unlit bombs, slimed pegs, walls, and those brick bumpers. It's also very rare, only available in the Forest.
• Universal Poison: Spinfection affects a slime just as much as it does a knight... just as much as it does a wall.
• Unstable Equilibrium: After a battle, a player has the choice of using their gold either towards improving their ball collection, or healing. A chain of bad luck can force a player to heal, which means they're not ready for the next encounter and can't focus on gathering gold, which means they have to heal...
• When Trees Attack: In the initial forest stage, some encounters may include stump-like foes that consistently walk forward, and will attack the player character just as any other foe.
• A Winner Is You: Completing the Mines only gets you a notification that you have done so, and, if applicable, a note that the next level of Cruciball has been unlocked.
• Zip Mode: A press of a button will speed everything up to 1.5x, 2x, or 3x speed. The only thing this doesn't affect is the spinning if you are Confused.

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