I never liked bullet hell shooters, until Xenotilt put one inside my new favourite pinball table

I don’t consider myself a pinball purist, but I’ve been burnt enough by attempts to mix pinball with other genres to be somewhat cautious. You don’t live through Odama, an absolutely bizarre attempt to mix pinball and RTS that had to be played with voice controls, without wishing that developers would just leave lovely old pinball alone. 

But then something like Xenotilt comes along. Xenotilt is so good it’s even distracted me from my Balatro obsession. It mixes pinball with bullet hell sci-fi shoot-’em-ups, and this self-described ‘hostile pinball action’ game has pretty much ruined normal pinball for me. Although to be fair, it has about as much in common with a normal pinball table as I do. 

If the Xenotilt pinball machine existed in real life you’d need to be nine feet tall with a spare pair of eyes in your neck to be any good at it. Because it’s really three pinball tables stacked on top of each other, with a boss monster ruling over each one. These include an angry android cat that’s also a blackjack dealer, a furious Shodan-a-like at the top of the table who also serves as the game’s cutting commentator, and another cyberlady with cleavage that makes me a little embarrassed to be writing about this game. 

If that last run-on sentence felt overwhelming and nonsensical then just try playing it. In motion, Xenotilt is a gorgeous riot of colours, detonations, multiballs, gunfire, pained shrieks, and barks (which vary from “impressive!” to “UGH! HOW DARE YOU?!”). It only ever really pauses for breath when it’s teleporting you to another table, sometimes for a break to play an explosive game of billiards for some reason. Like a dolphin beached by an exploding fireworks factory, you’ll likely spend your first few games just desperately waving your flippers as you try to figure out what the hell is going on.

Luckily the basic principles of pinball will see you through the early confusion: hitting things with ball is good and ball falling in hole at bottom is bad. After 65 hours of play, I understand most of its jargon and how to achieve the biggest scores. But I’ve enjoyed it from hour one because I don’t think I’ve ever met anything more satisfying to slam a pinball against than a giant angry face that hates me. On glorious impact, these bosses flash, sometimes they bark, and often they look incredibly offended that a mere pinball dare strike them. The not-Shodan lady at the very top loses more artificial skin with every wallop, revealing the furious Terminator head lurking just under the surface. Naturally these bosses then counterattack, usually by spraying waves of bullets and swarms of smaller enemies everywhere, all increasing the chances of your tiny little ball taking a fatal bounce into that gap at the bottom.