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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIt’s Adam Ferrando’s Demon Tilt, published under his nom de plume “Wiznwar”. Demon’s Tilt is an unabashedly videogame pinball with no interest in nostalgia for real-world pinball, with no money for an intellectual property, with an eldritch and noneuclidean disregard for what actual pinball is allowed to do. It came out in 2019 and fuck if I could ever figure out how to play it. But unlike a lot of videogame pinball, it was impossible not to make lots of stuff happen<\/em>. You would never launch a ball and faff about with the flippers trying to get some “heat” going. It was crammed with lo-res\/high-framerate busy-ness, alive with flashy activity and overflowing with unexplained systems. At the time, for me, it was good for a playthrough or two. But without some way to understand it better, to pierce the strange mind of Adam Ferrando, I had no interest in grinding against it for a high score. Besides, I had instead invested my attention in the breadth of Zen’s catalogue and the time-wasting pursuits of their meta-progression and unlockables and shameless appeal to the collector inside me. Gotta have ’em all! No time for your weirdness, Mr. Ferrando.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks in part to Zen’s evolving business model, and in part to my changing perspective over recent years, I’ve broken the tendency to have ’em all, in pinball and other pursuits, choosing instead to enjoy fewer and more distinct things more deeply. My videogame pinball is now limited to a handful of tables on the Nintendo Switch, and I’m very happy to have it that way. I don’t need another table and certainly not a weird one I’ll never understand. Or so I thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then I was kindly given a press code for Xenotilt, the sequel to Demon’s Tilt. I didn’t even know it existed. In fact, it didn’t quite register that it was the sequel because I’d mostly forgotten about Demon’s Tilt. But the moment I booted it up — “Always happy to take a look at an indie pinball game,” I thought — and it exploded into a burst of colorful activity like fireworks or magic mind candy, I knew exactly what it was, exactly who had made it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pinball tables are notorious for their vague documentation, for how you can read a bit about how they work, but you mostly have to figure out the particulars through trial-and-error. And I’ve mostly made my peace with this. I don’t mind reading the underwritten table guides and taking it from there. I don’t mind learning by doing, and besides, pinball tables share a common vocabulary. I speak the language, so I have plenty of context for what they’re doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Xenotilt, as befits the name, is utterly alien. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s overwhelming at first. It’s overwhelming long after. It remains overwhelming, which I suppose is part of the appeal. There’s so much going on onscreen and as befits the subtitle — Hostile Pinball Action — it’s not going to tell you very much. The only tutorial tip tells you to cradle the ball with a flipper and nudge down to fire your lasers, but only if you have ammo. Lasers? Ammo? I have no idea how to tell if I have ammo — the orange numbers on the right? — but eventually I have ammo, and my lasers fire. I also have arc lasers, which always seem to have triangle icons indicating ammo, but they never seem to fire. Would I even know what a firing arc laser looks like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A skull in a box indicates my nudges, which are apparently an important part of managing the ball and especially launching skill shots from the plunger. But I can’t quite tell how it works and my experiments haven’t helped. Sometimes the ball launches one place, and other times it launches somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The screen is alive with floating bits like bullet hell bullets, but I have no idea if I should collect them or avoid them. Sometimes a laser tracks and appears to burn my ball, but I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I start to spell LARVAE, SCARAB, or COLONY somehow. As the letters light up, small boxes off to the side provide instructions, but I often don’t know what they mean. When I somehow hit a lock option, I can drop the ball into my choice of a matrix slot to unlock a perk, which then lights up on the pause screen, but I have no idea what most of them do. My multiplier racks up and tumbles over itself, increments at a time, causing the digitized lady robot voice to stutter, “M-M-M-M-Multiplier up!” My devo-meter climbs after a game as if I were earning ranks. I unlock protocols, which seem important. I never earn wizard score and don’t even know what it is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The four levels of the table, each with their own set of flippers guarding a drain, are stacked vertically so that I’m only in danger of losing the ball when it’s at the bottom level. Each level has a different boss, sitting conveniently in the center, waiting to be smacked with the pinball. Eventually a boss is smacked sufficiently and dies and is replaced with another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The screen is festooned with numbers and stats, many of them unlabeled and almost all of them a mystery to me. Jackpots pop off, kickbacks activate, sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — multiballs happen and there’s no way I can keep them going with all this light and movement and activity across four separate levels. To say it’s overwhelming is an understatement. It’s impossible. It’s absurd, crazy, an exercise in frantic pinball helplessness. Who could ever comprehend all this madness? Who would even play such a thing? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Me. Again and again, but usually only one game at a time before I’m exhausted by the mad swirl. But always again, for the sheer density of whatever’s happening, for the inevitable heat in each ball, for the slow emergence of something like competence if not comprehension, for my gradually climbing scores, from six million to nineteen million to twenty six million to nearly fifty million and soon maybe more. I recognize some of the bosses and even dread some of them. The lady robot voice talks to me, narrates what I’m doing, but it’s mostly digitized xenobabble to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are different ways to play, although I’m reluctant to leave the confines of whatever “normal mode” implies. The “ex-mode” adds secret areas I can unlock with bonus room passkeys that I’ll get when I complete whatever protocols are. Then I can choose “ex-survivors” I’ve rescued to bring into later games for bonuses, some of which I don’t pretend to understand. For instance, the Oxygen System Manager will bank jackpots when xenoswarms use vents. There are xenoswarms? There are vents? That’s news to me. I somehow earned three tokens, which I used to unlock survivors. I have rescued survivors in Xenotilt! “Hardccore mode” gives me a single ball to do my best, and “crisis mode” puts me on a clock always counting down unless I do things to add time somehow. I appreciate these options and one day, maybe I’ll explore them further. For the time being, normal mode is plenty overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am disappointed that the table guide is so unhelpful. What Xenotilt really needs, and what it could have provided without compromising the mad swirl of its weirdness, is a diagram pointing to the different numbers and HUD element around the screen, at least telling me what they are. What does that number mean? What about that one? What is that referencing? And where can I see how much ammo I have? <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you take up Xenotilt, if you’re down for the insanity, a few tips. The array of options is as confusing and underexplained as the game itself. Here are a couple of settings that have helped me better see where the ball is and what it’s doing.. Under the “Gameplay” tab, enable “Softer Sprite Flashes” and “Dim Playfield”, and perhaps even boost the “Dimming Strength Slider”, which will make the ball stand out better. Under the “Visual” tab, disable “Score Pips” to turn off the flashing numbers every time you earn points. I’ve left “Critical Score Pips” enabled, since I rarely seem to score whatever qualifies as “critical score”. But most importantly, regardless of options settings, accept that you’re in over your head, that this will be too much, and that in the end, its hostility will either drive you away or, in my case, pull you in. I have stared into the abyss of Xenotilt and now that it’s stared back, I am lost in its weird eyes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Xenotilt is available on the PC, PS5, and Switch. This review is based on messing around with all three. The Switch version has fewer configuration options and suffers from noticeable hitches in framerate, but I’m told an update is in the works. The estimated release is early November.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n (UPDATE November 6, 2025<\/strong>: An update for the Nintendo Switch version of Xenotilt has done an admirable job smoothing out the noticeable hitches!<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I fuss a lot about interface and documentation and how videogames teach themselves to us. When I play a game, it’s important for me to eventually know what’s going on, to understand the systems, to wrap my head around the design. I want to know enough to make informed decisions, to fully appreciate what I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Xenotilt-3-1024x576.jpg\")
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