Pig Eat Ball

Developed by Mommy's Best Games, Pig Eat Ball is an action-puzzler that is pretty much as self-explanatory as it gets (you play as a pig and you eat balls). The puzzle-focused title made its debut on PC last September, but it has now made its way onto consoles, and we had the chance to check out the Switch version.

In the game you play as an adventure-hungry young pig named Princess Bow, who has been pressured into tying the knot by her cake-headed father, King Cake. Desperate to find a worthy suitor, King Cake sets up a gauntlet of challenges known as the Royal Games, and Princess Bow decides to intervene and enters herself dressing in a rather poor makeshift disguise. The plot is wonderfully absurd and the dialogue matches this, as it had us cracking a smile during more than a few occasions, with most NPCs spouting their own hilariously terrible quips and jokes.

Within adventure mode you'll compete within the aforementioned Royal Games by completing challenges handed out from clamshells scattered across the map. As the title suggests, the main objective is for you to gobble up all of the balls within a given stage, but there are some variations on this formula, such as having a time or health limit.

Alongside adventure mode there's also a party mode where you can play competitive mini-games against the AI or with up to three different players. This also lets you play levels from the five worlds in adventure mode, and these can be selected at your leisure.

Tying in with the outlandish main plot is the inclusion of vomiting as a central mechanic in Pig Eat Ball. If you snag yourself on a stage hazard, Princess Bow will spew her guts out, sending balls bouncing across the arena coated in lucid green goo. You'll also spew up a second time if you're to gobble up more than one vomit-covered ball in quick succession, which is important to take note of in time-sensitive challenges where you can't afford to dash around. You can trigger your own vomit and you'll need to use your gag reflexes tactically in some stages to allow you to fit through tight pathways, as you balloon in size with each ball that you consume.

The adventure mode is stuffed with content over 200 different stages, meaning there's a lot for you to play over five space stations, each with their own motif. Each new station introduces its own spin on the Pac Man-like action, with the third world, for example, introducing dart-throwing bugs and bowling balls for you to launch to knock down obstructing skittles.

After collecting all the pearls in a given area you will face off against a concluding boss battle, with the majority providing some of the most memorable stages. One boss we fought was a moving blob of cheesy nachos that fired tortilla chips at us and spewed out fiery hot salsa, which gives you a sense of the weird and wonderful variety.

Within each space station you'll also find an optional series of puzzles that will usually reward you with an equippable customisation item. Not only do objects such as army helmets and wax lips make you look downright silly, but they also come with their own set of pros and cons that impact gameplay. The pair of wax lips, for example, gives you a longer suction range but causes you to gag a faster rate than usual. There are also temporary power-ups and an easy difficult mode that you alternate to, which helps to relax the fail conditions.

What has to be Pig Eat Ball's largest downfall is how repetitive its core loop quickly becomes. To the developer's credit, new mechanics are constantly sprinkled in to keep players on their toes, but you are still just continuously looping around areas hoovering up balls and trying not to vomit. Its simplicity is charming in a way, but we found ourselves unable to play for prolonged periods due to how fatiguing the repetition would become. Perhaps shaving down the 200 levels slightly would have been beneficial to help the pacing feel more manageable.

We played the Switch version for review and found that the bite-sized stages are perfect for on-the-go play in handheld mode. Pig Eat Ball debuted on the PC about a year prior, and one fault we noted in the console versions is that it was absent of the build mode which allowed players to play stages crafted by other users. This mode is curiously absent from the console versions (perhaps due to technical limitations), which is a real shame.

With cake-faced rulers, talking clams, and vomit-spewing hogs, Pig Eat Ball is certainly a weird game, but it shines because of that. Things can start to feel repetitive though when playing for prolonged periods and we were disappointed by the absence of the user-created build mode on consoles, but if you think you can stomach the repetition, we are sure that you will get a lot out of this quirky retro-inspired indie.