Released May 2024, Rack and Slay is a billiards-meets-dungeon crawler roguelike. Created by Ludokultur and published by 2 Left Thumbs, the game has you playing as a cue ball warrior sinking enemy balls to win. With a standard arcade mode, multiple difficulty levels, and 20 challenge modifiers, Rack and Slay has a surprising amount of content for a small game.

Rack’em Up

Rack and Slay has a very simple setup. You play as a white ball knocking red balls into corner pockets or spikes alongside the edges of the screen. If you do not kill every enemy within a set number of shots, you lose health for every remaining enemy on screen. Progress to earn coins to spend on upgrades, shot power, number of shots, or health recovery. The game grows in difficulty by adding more enemies that deal more damage, and later having the player continue to take damage after each shot until every enemy is slain. A run ends when you die.

Of course, Rack and Slay has a number of elements that keep things interesting. There are challenges that modify the game such as altering base stats or having the player start with certain items. They can be played endlessly, giving some variety to the gameplay. 

Map Hazards and Enemy Types

It is worth mentioning the hazards in Rack and Slay. The game has a number of different kinds of traps sprinkled about, such as bear traps that will instantly kill enemies, and deal one damage to you. Along the walls of most arenas are spikes that will kill anyone who gets launched into them. Both of these I’m bringing up specifically because they will be important later.

On that note, the enemies do come in a variety. Some of them launch a ball at you after you take a shot. Two disappear after you make contact with them and steal a coin or a hit point from you. Every five levels will also feature a boss that has different gimmicks such as launching two balls every turn from cannons or tossing a bomb. 

Upgrades and Snowballing

With most roguelikes, the item variety comes down mostly in two ways: you either get a number of different items or hard stat increases to stay safe, or you snowball into some true game-breaking stuff. Rack and Slay mostly does the latter. There have been a few runs where a few specific items can truly get the ball rolling, pun intended. 

A lot of the items in Rack and Slay are split between a few different groups. Some of them increase the amount of shot-power based on factors or having a 20% of duplicating an earned item. However, there are certain combinations of items that are entertaining and utterly break the system. Trapper (you are immune to bear traps and spawn more per level) and Blackjack (the first enemy that you touch no longer deals damage) are insane enough on their own once you begin stacking them. 

Probably the funniest combo found involved an item that prevents the first damage you take as long as you have gold to pay for it, and another item that has a black hole-like effect whenever you fall into a hole. So, the first few shots involve you just shooting yourself into the void to drag enemies in with you. It’s hilarious, but so very effective.

Final Thoughts

With Rack and Slay, what you see is what you get. The game offers a fun time, and I would say it was time well-spent. There’s not a whole lot of depth to it, but the fun shenanigans one can get into and the thrill of absolutely breaking the game is entertaining. If you are looking for a novel but chill roguelike experience, Rack and Slay will satisfy that niche for a couple hours or more!

Rack and Slay was released May 27th, 2024. It retails for $5.99.