During my visits to the Pinball Hall of Fame, I discovered I’m a bit of a “pinball wizard,” as The Who would say. Unlike Tommy, I’m certainly not good enough at pinball to play it solely by sense of smell, but I can generally get by well enough. Now there’s a new challenger in the realm of video games that’s caught my eye: Caromble, developed and published by Crimson Owl Studios. Caromble combines elements of pinball with those of block-breaker games like Breakout and Arkanoid. How well does Caromble mix those two elements? I’m glad you asked!

According to Steam, Caromble launched in Early Access on August 27th, 2015, and has only just left Early Access as of this article’s publication. I double- and triple-checked every reference I could find because I could have sworn that had to be inaccurate, but as far as I can tell, Caromble was indeed in Early Access for nearly eleven years. That strikes me as quite an unusual development time for a game of this nature. I’ve no idea why development took so long, but it seems Caromble has benefited from the past decade plus it’s spent in the metaphorical oven.

I’m going to proceed under the assumption that everyone in our audience has at least a basic understanding of how to play pinball. As for the block-breaker influences from Breakout and Arkanoid, the core gameplay is simple: You have a paddle you can move along the bottom of the screen to hit a ball upward into blocks that break when hit. The more blocks you break without letting the ball go out-of-bounds, the higher your score. If you let the ball go out-of-bounds too many times, you get a game over. Caromble is similarly easy to pick up and play.

Caromble’s campaign is broken up into several story chapters, each of which contains multiple levels. Each level is then further subdivided into different stages, with a boss fight at the end. In each stage, you’ll use your paddle and ball to break destructible objects in your environment (which aren’t always blocks or bricks) until you’ve fully charged a portal somewhere in the stage. Once the portal is charged, you simply hit the ball into the portal to proceed to the next stage of the current level. Caromble’s campaign has an overarching story that helps to explain your ultimate goal.

In Caromble’s opening cinematic, it’s explained that “six devices of great power were scattered throughout the universe.” These six devices, called “Arkatrons,” each grant a specific power to whoever wields them. Based on the number of Arkatrons and the powers each one of them grants its wielder, they’re not unlike the Infinity Stones from Marvel Comics. All six Arkatrons can be combined into “the most powerful device in the universe,” the titular Caromble. The Arkatrons are kept on an alien planet specified to be “unknown to humans,” and they’re all stolen by an unnamed evil entity.

That jerk who stole the Arkatrons serves as the final boss of each individual level within each chapter of the campaign. Two beings from the planet that used to contain the Arkatrons hop in their spaceship (which serves as your paddle) and chase the boss around Earth to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs. When you defeat the boss at the end of the final stage in each chapter, the boss coughs up one of the six Arkatrons. I’m sure you can connect the dots from here. That brings me to Caromble’s core gameplay loop, of which I’ve already explained the majority.

You can hold down the left mouse button to charge up your paddle. Hitting the ball with a fully charged paddle will cause the ball to release a shockwave as it travels, which can be used both to break several objects at once and to destroy things that are otherwise too durable to break normally. The catch is that you can’t move your paddle while charging, but you don’t have to fully charge all at once. You can move when you need to while retaining a portion of your charge meter. This adds a nice bit of “risk vs. reward” to Caromble.

You have a limited number of lives in each stage. Each time your ball goes out-of-bounds, you lose a life; as you’d expect, when you run out of lives, you’ll have to start the current level over from the beginning. However, if you’re playing on Easy or Normal difficulty, you can choose to take advantage of what Caromble calls its “mercy” system. This gives you extra lives and allows you to continue from exactly where you left off, albeit at the cost of no longer earning medals for high scores and quick completion times on the current level.

On Normal difficulty, this gives you a single extra life. On Hard difficulty, the “mercy” system is entirely unavailable. On Easy, the mercy system gives you not one, not two, but a whopping one hundred extra lives. That may seem like overkill, but I actually think it’s a really nice touch. I’m a firm believer in the idea that people should be free to play games on whatever difficulty setting is the most fun and/or most accessible for them without fear of judgment from others, and this aspect of Caromble certainly ticked both of those boxes for me.

I have no intention of going for a 100% completion, unlock-all-medals speedrun of Caromble, so the fact that using the mercy system on Easy difficulty locks me out of two-thirds of each level’s medals doesn’t bother me a bit. I also have no qualms about saying I often wound up using a good chunk of those 100 extra lives, especially during a boss fight in the third story chapter. Considering how many lives I lost during that fight on Easy mode, I’d probably have nightmares about it if I were trying to do a 100% completion speedrun of Caromble on Hard.

Caromble purports to have gamepad support, but I didn’t see the need to try that out since its core gameplay is easy to play with just a mouse. On that note, Caromble looks fantastic and has always run at an enjoyably smooth frame rate in my experience, even on its highest graphics settings. Granted, considering Caromble isn’t exactly a resource-heavy game and its development has gone on for over a decade, perhaps that’s not surprising. Caromble isn’t the kind of game I’d go out of my way to look for or to 100% complete, but I really enjoyed my time with it.

A PC review copy of Caromble! was provided by Crimson Owl Studios for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Caromble!

$12.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Core gameplay is easy to learn.
• Gameplay can give you that addicting “just one more try” mindset.
• Excellent graphical fidelity and performance.

Cons

• Story feels unnecessary.
• Perks of playing on Easy might be considered overkill.