Image credit: bilge/Future Friends Games
STICKER/BALL is a glorious rainbow of chaotic gameplay, tasking players with firing off balls at sticker-coated dice, using everything from pufferfish to the concept of autocracy to defeat enemies like sentient teapots.
With a roguelike format and a deliciously psychedelic art style, STICKER/BALL is a number-go-up bonanza that I’ve been having a blast with. Here’s Kyusai’s full review of STICKER/BALL, looking at what makes this gem so compelling.
Bang, crash, kapow, and so forth
The core gameplay loop in STICKER/BALL is simple. It’s a roguelike with pool-like mechanics, where you take aim and shoot a ball at a target, trying to hit a certain score to defeat the enemy for each round.
The targets are dice, which change position after every ball you fire. Each time you fire a ball, you’ll be able to pick up a sticker to place on a dice face, with your number of dice increasing as you make progress.
Stickers apply weird and wonderful modifiers to the game – one might sellotape a banana to the playing field or bust out a meter stick to measure the map, while another might send a cop car careening into the wall, with the donut shop sticker modifying how the cop car is scored due to their synergy.
Synergy and combos are the name of the game here, too. Almost every sticker has a combo effect with another sticker that you can make use of, and the game rewards smart builds with higher scores.
Some of the sticker effects are simple, enhancing your score once activated, while others are more complex, like the jigsaw piece, requiring you to complete a puzzle to claim a massive score reward.
I was pleasantly surprised each time I got to pick a new sticker or buy one from the store. There were heaps of unique designs and effects to play with, and it kept me coming back for just one more round. Each time I lost, I felt inspired to check out a new build and experiment with new stickers.
Ridiculously chaotic and fun
STICKER/BALL starts simple, with just one die for you to play with, but it gets progressively more chaotic as you go through the game. After a few levels, you’ll have stacks of dice to mess with, each with its own sticker slots, which opens up the playing field for more elaborate builds.
There are also small quality-of-life features in place, like a subtle highlight on dice when you’re about to buy a duplicate sticker, to help make the mid-to-late-game building process a little less intense.
New modifications can be unlocked as you play – while this may seem like it’s more of a roguelite feature than a roguelike feature, you can turn these off, which I’d say makes it still roguelikeish. These mods can add to the experience nicely, but they’re not essential if you prefer a trickier experience.
STICKER/BALL’s art style is immediately distinguishable from other games in the genre, and I found one of my favorite things about the game was seeing which little doodles would appear when placing down a new sticker.
The enemies for each round – or friends, rather – were unique, too, with everything from a talking fish with wings to a sentient kettle. The game’s aesthetic is gorgeously whimsical, and it’s a delight to explore.
Performance-wise, I didn’t encounter any major issues while playing through STICKER/BALL. The experience was smooth and polished overall, with no notable frame drops, bugs, or glitches – other than the glitch and bug-themed stickers, of course.
While folks who don’t usually play number-go-up indie roguelikes may not find mountains to get excited about in STICKER/BALL, avid genre geeks are in for a treat with this new gem. It’s an eclectic scoop of psychedelia with extra sprinkles, and it’s ridiculously moreish, lending itself to the “just one more round” mentality easily.
FAQs
STICKER/BALL was developed by bilge and published by Future Friends Games.
STICKER/BALL is a chaotic roguelike where players fire balls at sticker-covered dice, with pool-adjacent mechanics.
No, STICKER/BALL is a purely single-player experience.
STICKER/BALL can be played on PC, via Steam, Itch.io, and Newgrounds.
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