Pig Eat Ball is a bewildering and frankly disgusting game of sportsball
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Pig Eat Ball
- Developer: Mommy’s Best Games
- Publisher: Mommy’s Best Games
- PC
Bizarre, bewildering and frankly disgusting. That’s how I’d describe pretty much any other game from Mommy’s Best Games. Thankfully, they’re also a lot of fun, Pig Eat Ball included.
The trademark Mommy’s Best Games originality is here, with out there mechanics and art. Previously, their games all shared a similar rough, overgrown art style. There were grimy textures that felt as if they’d been melted and reconstituted into ridiculously detailed tableaus.
Pig Eat Ball goes for a more animated vibe, with a lighter hand on textures, more broad strokes of colors and expressive characters. It’s still made up of an absolutely bewildering combination of imagery, but there’s a more confident, less chaotic approach this time.
Not that the chaos is gone, no, no.
While the art goes with a clear, readable style, the mechanics branch into several bizarre takes on the maze running genre. There’s a few basic moves, but how they interact with each level’s layouts and gimmicks gets a lot of mileage out of them.
The princess, a pig in disguise at a tournament held to decide who wins her hand, constantly inhales objects in front of her, which can be spit out in a barf covered state. Holding her breath makes her move slower, and a dash lets her crash through objects and build speed by timing the next two dashes. Inhaling tennis balls increases her size, which prevents her from getting through narrow passages, but might be useful to take down certain obstacles. Oh, and if you inhale a barfed up ball too soon, or get hit, you’ll spew the contents of your stomach.
Things get really chaotic when these basic mechanics play off the environment. At the start I was simply gathering up tennis balls, spitting them into new rooms, and avoiding them as I waited for the gross stuff to roll off the spit up balls. But soon I was puking on bugs to make them puke, losing ghosts in Pac-man mazes, eating their brains, and using my suction to drag balls through mazes to get them to areas where I could gobble em up.
There’s a real madcap, experimental quality to a lot of the stage designs. It’s the kind of game where you look at the stage title to get an idea of what the heck the designer was thinking, then parse the gimmick while trying to avoid the tricks they’ve laid out for you. Then you do it again to get the gold medal.
It’s a familiar loop, and it would be easy to get comfortable with if it wasn’t for how outlandish it gets. It seriously, seriously gets weird. Like, I’ve played a lot of games and seen a lot of weird games, but most of them use familiar, predictable mechanics to direct you. In Pig Eat Ball I’m never quite sure what I’m gonna see next, or what the next stage is gonna have me do. It’s not so scattershot that I find myself lost, but there’s an astounding set of ideas on display.
Within the first stage I was doing careful sneaking missions, fast paced races against the clock, convoluted mazes, and even engaging in battles with bugs where I had to gobble up more balls, catch stars and uh, build a sandwich. Then I topped it off by fighting a giant dragon who was also an accordion.
Describing what you do in Pig Eat Ball really doesn’t do it justice. This is the kind of game that’s bursting with a creative energy that you just sort of have to witness yourself. It’s got the level design sensibility of an arcade game, but with a willingness to recontextualize itself at every turn. I could write another five paragraphs just listing notable stage gimmicks, but you wouldn’t get the same rapid fire nonsense that comes along with each of them.
There really is something wonderful and bizarre about Pig Eat Ball. It’s a refreshing game to take in bite sized stages, often leaving me with a a bemused, and somewhat disgusted, smile.