Pool of Madness gives pool the Balatro treatment

Cynic that I am, I suspect this is a third-order Balatro derivative: another “[traditional game] roguelike” of the sort we’ve already seen a distressing number of. The simplicity of this foundation annoys me slightly because it quite often works, which feels like cheating, but I must concede that traditional games have the benefit of at least a few hundred years’ playtesting, and Pool of Madness bolts on such a broad range of additions that nobody could accuse it of merely coasting on prior art.

It’s pool, of course, but cursed: you play in some sort of haunted pirate ship beset by ghostly tentacled horrors, each game is badged as a ritual, and blood gushes from the pockets after each successful round. The act of playing borrows little more from actual pool than the act of pointing a cue: you just have to pot a small number of balls, not in sequence (or at least, not in the demo); potting the cueball just spits it back onto the table; you can stop it dead at any point during play and each ritual ends with the option to buy upgrades from a device that looks like if Bioshock had fruit machines. 

This is operated using the two types of currency earned from each round. Potting balls earns Void Echoes, boosted by getting them in highlighted pockets or by triggering upgrades granted by hitting spectral balls added to the table. Separately one may collect Golden Pearls by potting golden balls, which also manifest at various points. Between some rounds you get a choice of additional modifiers, triggered by firing the cue ball at one of three haunted skulls; at any point during the game you can hit a cursed hand left on the table which will levitate all non-scoring balls for several turns.

Each multi-stage ritual requires you to pot a few balls and gives you a finite number of shots per stage to achieve it; the aim is to soak up as many upgrades and potential earnings as possible without exhausting the number of shots, or by potting the black or red balls which will drain your sanity. Modifiers and rules steadily accumulate, the tables get weirder, occasionally pockets are blocked with cursed portals or haunted skulls. The latter can be easily despatched with your musket gun, as can any of the balls on the table (or other, non-ball items that later appear; at one point I triggered something that scattered it with dead fish), but bullets are extremely scarce so overuse is not encouraged. 

Operating the cue is very easy: simply position the target dot and choose the level of force. This is just fallible enough that you can miss long shots down the table, and doing shots off the cushion is asking for trouble until you start unlocking cue upgrades that show the ball trajectory, but unless you’re particularly unlucky then the focus can be on maximising your score and picking off the new balls that are routinely added to the table. Yellow balls grant the aforementioned cue upgrades, bullet balls give you more ammunition, explosive balls vaporise anything within their blast radius, and so on. 

The demo stops just short of the “boss fight”, which looks like a face-off against some sort of spectral octopus. I am intrigued to discover what additional challenges this will add, but the foundations show some promise. Currently it’s a gentle, literal, knockabout that rarely poses any substantial challenge; the trick will be seeing if a very basic pool mechanic can be elevated by the escalating number of eldritch modifiers the game applies to it.