Game not actually fun?

[mti_]

The economy feels bad, so does making builds and obtaining sustain.
Really not enough control to make runs fun. Fighting does not reward you.
RNG element is way too strong over the rougelite aspect of the game I feel.

[Guppy]

then just don’t play the game? i’d you aren’t enjoying it don’t play it

[Mr Red]

Having played a lot of different rougelikes at the highest difficulty level, I feel like Peglin just doesn't give you enough control to get a good build going most of the time given how many options there are and how niche they are. I feel like I'm having less fun at higher cruciballs honestly so if that's getting you down try taking a break or lowering the difficulty and messing around a bit. It's a shame because the core gameplay is pretty fun, but slay the spire ascension 20 it ain't.

[maxzslayer29]

I can agree with that for sure, especially the sustain bit. I think like cruciball 12 is the cut off of being able to win consistently, I was really hoping to see some run consistency issues fixed in 1.0. Either those changes are coming or they are not. Ill beat ball 20 and go back to playing 12

[phillip_lynx]

Originally posted by maxzslayer29:

I can agree with that for sure, especially the sustain bit. I think like cruciball 12 is the cut off of being able to win consistently, I was really hoping to see some run consistency issues fixed in 1.0. Either those changes are coming or they are not. Ill beat ball 20 and go back to playing 12

I also aim for 20.

And then I go to custom games. They are fun. I think on every CB Level :)

[mti_]

I feel like either a run goes nowhere because of RNG or gets out of control powerful because a build does come together. Difficulty is not dynamic.

[Jaeus]

It's a game I want to be fun.
It's a game I think should be fun.
And yet... it just ends up being far more frustrating than fun.

Like you all hit on, the gold income in the game sucks too much for shop prices. Post combat orb selections and upgrades shouldn't cost gold on top of that.
Danged if half the ? events in the game aren't outright bad most of the time, not only often costing you HP for no gain so you don't put even more garbage into your deck, but also costing you the gold income over it just being a normal fight.

It feels like the dev looked at Slay the Spire and then asked:
- How can I make something fun based on this, but then make it not actually fun?

[Macilnar]

Originally posted by Jaeus:

It's a game I want to be fun.
It's a game I think should be fun.
And yet... it just ends up being far more frustrating than fun.

Like you all hit on, the gold income in the game sucks too much for shop prices. Post combat orb selections and upgrades shouldn't cost gold on top of that.
Danged if half the ? events in the game aren't outright bad most of the time, not only often costing you HP for no gain so you don't put even more garbage into your deck, but also costing you the gold income over it just being a normal fight.

It feels like the dev looked at Slay the Spire and then asked:
- How can I make something fun based on this, but then make it not actually fun?

There is also the fact the Devs keep nerfing and/or removing stuff that are fun.

[Ze_eT]

Originally posted by Guppy:

then just don’t play the game? i’d you aren’t enjoying it don’t play it

The painful part is not just that it is not fun, it's that it has slowly become less fun with every nerf and difficulty increase. I can't imagine reaching Cruciball 20 because all of my C16 runs lose to factors outside my control. And the sad part is that this is the release version.
Maybe they will still add some player control to the game considering they probably just rushed the release so they can publish their game on the Switch, but also most of the problems have been called out wayyyy before 1.0.

[Horolicht]

Cruciball challenges might be challenging, but not the good and fun kind of challenging. While other roguelikes can give you a feeling of overcoming a challenge by mere skill, this game doesn't give you that. Since 1.0 I haven't played much, but before that I got each character to CB16 and I don't intend to play much from here on out.

My biggest gripe is, that there is not much variety in what you are doing and even builds don't vary much since there are only so many good builds to get to the end consistantly. Of course the RNG fiesta is doing it's thing there as well.
On higher CB-levels you get so many useless pegs into your arsenal from the start, each run starts with the chore to go to each "?" and hope for good upgrades or peg-removal. People actually told me: "Yea just go to "?"-Events if you don't like all the stones in the inventory"
Really? Sounds like bad game design to me, that every other path is useless to me.

Custom games can give you a proper and actually fun challenge. It's still sad that the main game can't do that by itself. It's not like you actually get smth out of playing until CB20. What an unfun timewaster this game became. No progression whats-o-ever.

[Tachrayonic]

I dislike the Cruciball system as a method of increasing the difficulty.

As I unlock the harder difficulties in the game, what I would want is the ability to make better builds to deal with said difficulty.
Something like Binding of Isaac, where the harder difficulties add additional levels you have to go through, while giving you more time, chances or options to make a good build.
But what Cruciball does is it makes your starting build worse, cuts your money to makes it harder to buy things you want, and makes enemies harder on top of that.

If every few levels of Cruciball increased the number of encounters you go through on the path to the boss, giving the opportunities to get more stuff and actually get a good build, then maybe it would be more fun.

[mti_]

Cruciball makes the game less fun to play but without it there is no challenge.

[soldyne]

I am glad to see that I am not the only one that believes that challenge is not equivalent to "more RNG". I saw a bunch of vids on this game on YouTube from older builds and thought, that it would a fun time. now that I am playing it myself, its just annoying, frustrating, boring and I kind of regret starting it now.
how to fix:
better RNG manipulation
a way to re-do a flubbed ball (we have discards, why not a re-do mechanic).
fewer ball types, most of them are useless (a banish mechanic similar to Vampire Survivors would work).

[Eucrasia]

Yeah, huge-time Isaac and Qud player, beaten Nethack more times than I care to admit, play CDDA like it's going out of style, and generally just love roguelikes as a genre. But I think this game and Slay the Spire are the two most overrated piles of crap I've ever had the displeasure of being suckered into buying - and it's for the exact same reason: over-reliance on builds that aren't allowed to come together if the stars don't align EXACTLY right. Like, seriously, devs, have you EVER put together a deck for MTG or Pokemon? The Star Wars card game? Netrunner? Anything????

Also, yeah, the gold economy in Peglin is dumb as rocks, and the ball physics is a work of art (negative).

[Level12Boss]

I'm chiming in with a heads-up for new players who are on the fence about getting Peglin.

I absolutely love roguelikes and deck builders, but I pretty quickly refunded on Peglin.

As of v. 1.0, I can only recommend this game for roguelike deckbuilders who really don't mind a steep learning curve, repetitious climb, and being punished a lot more than you see success.

The core concept here is outstanding: mix a juiced up pachinko machine with a deck builder. Brilliant! General graphics and style of the game is also great.

Problem for me is that the deck building experience is very RNG driven and very very resource constrained. There's very little flexibility to, you know, actually build a deck. You just get what you get with very limited chances to manage it.

At least in the early game. Maybe it gets better. But I played 4-5 complete rounds and just never felt any synergy or flow going across any of the dozens of balls I was offered. The game balance overall felt tilted toward punishment, and I'm just not that kind of gamer. I recognise that some people absolutely love that kind of challenge, but just want people to know what they're getting with Peglin.

Comparatively, Balatro eases the player in with easier decks and easier cards, then slowly expands the mix of difficulty and complexity / variability. In Balatro and Spire, you always feel you have a chance. In Peglin you always feel pretty screwed.

I would definitely look at this game again if it gets a complete re-balance and re-itemization.

[Monkey Grass]

ive played way too much of this game and i still somehow don't get better, the RNG element is much too prominent, and almost completely unavoidable.

that alone i would be okay with but the part that makes me mad is that some bosses just require specific types of builds or orbs to beat, so even if you have a well coordinated build you still end up with fights you simply cant win (e.g. crit build on tree thing, or slime build on slime boss) some builds also only ramp up late but on high CB you just lose before you can get there. ive found that the only way to win in high CB semi consistently is with bomb builds which after a while get boring.

i also noticed that the CB 20 is just straight up dumb, it adds "thematic" challenges to the bosses but they are wholly unbalanced and some are just way to hard, to the point where your just better off re-rolling your games till you get the mole because its just always easier compared to the other 2. the other great thing is that you cant go blind builds in late CB because 2 of the 3 bosses are immune to the effect and the other one is annoying and way too difficult for the point in the game it is at.

to me it seem like the devs lost track of the old bosses and fights strength when adding the new ones, in almost all cases the new bosses are 2x harder to fight and way less fun.

Gold is also a point of grief with, its annoying to collect, is used for everything and makes you have to make un-fun decisions constantly, its almost impossible to buy from the shops in W1 because if you do you die to the boss because you didnt upgrade orbs, or you get lucky. and god forbid you go to a shop with no god, you get nothing, at least let me fight the shop keep or something.