666 - Devil’s Crush

Best Games - Devil’s Crush

There have been a lot of video pinball games. I’m talking video game simulations of traditional pinball here, not just pinball machines that incorporate some video elements. Most of the early ones were bad. Some of the new ones are quite good. 3D Pinball Space Cadet that came free on a lot of versions of windows is actually very good (but we will get to that one another time). But most of them have one tragic flaw in common. They are trying to be pinball.

I really enjoy pinball. I find a lot of the machines around the early to mid 90s really enjoyable to play. They have the right balance of challenge and exploration. Learning how the games work and then attempting to optimize shots until you can achieve decent scores is pretty fun.

Until very recently, computers couldn’t simulate the physics involved in actual pinball accurately enough for video pinball games to feel real. Most of the history of video pinball is filled with slightly interesting toys that tried to approximate pinball. Like a racing sim, it’s nothing like sitting in a real car but you might get a fun sense of speed out of it.

As soon as simulating fairly accurate physics became attainable, game developers spent a lot of time recreating those old games from the 90s, but didn’t really explore what video pinball could be.

Devil’s Crush, like Alien Crush before it, doesn’t really care how pinball works in the real world. This is video pinball, baby. Your real world rules don’t apply here.

Devil’s Crush is a playfield about eight miles long with zones and warps that transport you to the nether realms of pinball. You might put the ball in one hole only to have it come out into a boss fight against a whirling nightmare of bones. You might hit a target enough times that it transforms into some sort of reptilian ghoul. Strange creatures wander the playfield and redirect the ball every time they are hit by it.

It’s a whole lot of something.

But it isn’t pinball. It’s something else entirely.

I think a lot of times when video game developers try to adapt something from the real world into the digital, card games, board games, sports, they really do their best to preserve that original experience. The lesson of Devil’s Crush is — Don’t.

Video games are untethered to the real world in a way that other games could only dream of. They don’t need to be a simulation of a real thing. They can be weird and wild. They can be a pinball game that plays very little like pinball.

Devil’s Crush is a pinball game that doesn’t play like a pinball game. And that makes it one of the Best Games.