When you’ve been playing video games for decades, you start to notice all the different trends in this great hobby. I’m old enough to remember the eras of mascot platformers, military shooters and those early indie darlings, and even in modern age the trends keep on changing. My beloved Balatro helped kick off the Big Number Roguelike, with its Poker hands and score chasing. Cloverpit was a similar success story that traded cards with slots, and the Big Number Roguelike is now officially here to stay. Sticker/Ball is a particularly unusual twist on this newly sprouting genre, featuring dice, balls, and old Nokia phones.
The goal in Sticker/Ball is simple – score enough points to beat your opponent without running out of balls. Your opponent is essentially nothing more than a score and a picture, but I did appreciate taking on foes like Clippy from Microsoft Word.
To score points you’ll first automatically roll some dice, which will grant you points if you bounce a ball off them. With each ball you can see the exact path it will take, and every single bounce it will make. This means you’ll spend a lot of time in Sticker/Ball moving your cursor back and forth, until the zigzagging line goes particularly wild and you’re confident lots of points will be scored. It’s sort of like playing pool but without the pockets, at least until the stickers arrive.
Bouncing is only one part of the scoring puzzle, because after each ball you throw (or maybe launch) you’re given a sticker. You can place these on a face of any of your dice, and that effect will be unleashed when you hit that dice and roll it. These sticker effects are absolutely wild, like for example the sticker that starts a game of Snake that provides points over time. There’s a ruler sticker which creates an extra surface to bounce on, and extends when hit. These are some of the most basic sticker options though, because most of them interact with each other in interesting ways.
Early in one run I got a poo sticker, which when rolled would create a fly and grant me points. Then I found a spider sticker, which would happily eat the fly for bonus points. These different effects get exponentially more silly, as you build a sticker house for a sticker human who gets caught up in a sticker riot until the sticker police break it up. The layers of effects stack in a ridiculous manner, and I can’t decide if Sticker/Ball was made by a genius or a sicko (most likely both).
Even amongst the other stickers some stand out as particularly wild. Like the sticker which grants you bonus points if you’re offline (big thanks to my service provider for the bonus points while I waited for an engineer). Another sticker is simply titled “Pay to Win”, and gives you more points if you’ve bought other games from the developer. In case you haven’t noticed this Roguelike doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that’s the way I like it.
I could write more about all the silly stickers in the game, but I should also talk about the Roguelike structure. You’ll earn money for scoring points, and between enemies you can spend them at the shop to buy new stickers. With only a single die to start with the faces fill quickly, so it’s a good job you get a new die for each opponent. Before long you’ll fill the screen with cubes to bounce off, and that means more of those important points.
I must admit the new player experience of Sticker/Ball is rather overwhelming, as very little is explained to you about the nonsense you’re about to face. Losing early runs is more than expected though, as the permanent upgrades you unlock are practically necessary to actually complete a run. These helpful mods provide some seriously powerful effects, like score boosts for matching stickers or a guide that points you to the highest score for your last ball. Unlocking more of these is easy if you just keep playing too, providing that lovely sense of progression.
Sticker/Ball is compelling once you get to grips with it, but some elements always felt a little lacking. There’s no real skill in moving the mouse back and forth to find the most bounces, and lining the shot up when you find a good one is a bit fiddly. There are also just a lot of stickers I still don’t understand after hours of play, which can be rather frustrating.
I had more fun with Sticker/Ball the more I played it, but figuring out what makes the points tick doesn’t come easily. There’s no skill in finding the best spots to fire balls either, so a lot of the time it felt like I was going through the motions a bit. The actual sticker combinations can be wild though, and once the score explosions start it’s hard to feel anything but joy. Sticker/Ball doesn’t have the immediate hooks of a Balatro or CloverPit, but those who invest in it will still likely lose a few weeks of their life.