Solo Developer's Splatchinko Turns Pachinko Into a Cosmic Rescue Roguelike

A one-person Milan studio has turned a pachinko machine into a galaxy-spanning rescue mission. Splatchinko, the new game from solo developer Fabio Taurisano under the Stupidi Pixel banner, launched on Steam on November 11, pairing pixel-art roguelike structure with the bounce-and-ricochet logic of a peg board.

The premise is deliberately absurd: you play a cosmic entity whose partner has been kidnapped by a mysterious threat, and the only way to get them back is to fire a pair of ever-mutating eyeballs through a series of collapsing galaxies. It is a pitch that sounds like a joke until the mechanics underneath turn out to be unusually deep.

A pixel-art galaxy with a sense of humor

Visually, Splatchinko stays close to Stupidi Pixel's house style: chunky pixel-art sprites, exaggerated character designs, and a tone that never quite takes its own cosmic stakes seriously. Planets get flattened into peg boards, enemies telegraph their attacks with slapstick timing, and the framing device, an all-powerful being reduced to flinging its own eyeballs around for love, sets the comic register for everything that follows. It is the kind of presentation that leans into a small team's limitations rather than fighting them, favoring readability and personality over detailed animation.

How the pachinko loop actually works

Each run drops the player's "eyes" onto a peg-filled board, where they ricochet unpredictably before landing on scoring zones, enemy weak points, or chain-reaction triggers. Rather than a single lucky drop deciding the outcome, Splatchinko layers in turn-based tactical choices: players decide where and when to launch, which mutation to lean on, and how to sequence shots so one explosion sets off the next. The result sits closer to a tactics game wearing a pinball machine's skin than a pure game of chance.

Damage builds cumulatively as shots bounce across a board, and chains of collisions can detonate secondary effects, from area blasts to status effects on the planets and enemies being targeted. Boss fights cap off each stretch of the galaxy, forcing players to adapt their current build to a single, tougher scoring puzzle rather than a steady stream of weak targets.

A hundred eyes and seventy ways to break them

The customization layer is where Splatchinko tries to earn repeat playthroughs. The game ships with more than 100 eyes and over 70 mutations, which combine to reshape how a run's core loop behaves, echoing the build-your-own-engine appeal that has made other deckbuilding roguelikes stick around long after launch. Runs are built across branching, procedurally generated maps, so the order in which players encounter new eyes, mutations, and bosses changes from one galaxy to the next.

That branching structure means no two runs offer quite the same toolkit by the time a boss fight arrives, and it is the main lever Taurisano has to keep a one-person production feeling replayable against roguelikes built by much larger teams.

The comparison most frequently drawn around Splatchinko's demo was to Balatro, another small-team roguelike built around a single mechanical hook pushed to its limits. The two games play nothing alike in the moment to moment: one is a poker-scoring puzzle, the other a physics-driven ricochet game. What they share is a refusal to pad a focused idea out with systems that do not serve it, letting a deep mutation pool do the work that a larger feature list might otherwise handle.

From Death Noodle Delivery to the stars

Splatchinko is Stupidi Pixel's second major release, following the studio's earlier delivery game Death Noodle Delivery. Where that project leaned on absurdist errand-running, Splatchinko channels the same irreverent streak into a tighter, score-chasing structure built around a single core mechanic. A free demo covering the opening stretch of the game has been available on Steam since the spring, giving players a chance to test the eye-and-mutation system well ahead of the full launch.

The game is published by Stratos Gaming, an Italian indie publisher that also backs titles including The Fortress and Two Sides of Hell, and whose stated role is helping small studios fund and ship games they could not get out the door alone. For a solo developer, that kind of backing can be the difference between a finished roguelike and an abandoned prototype.

Price and availability

Splatchinko is available now exclusively on Steam for Windows, priced at $11.89, with a 20% launch discount bringing it down to $9.51 through its first week. There is no word yet on console ports; for now, the eyes stay on PC.

• Developer: Stupidi Pixel (solo project, Fabio Taurisano)
• Publisher: Stratos Gaming
• Platform: Steam (Windows)
• Launch price: $11.89, $9.51 with the first-week discount

Players curious about the loop before buying can still grab the free demo through the same Steam page, which covers the early galaxies and lets newcomers test a handful of eyes and mutations before committing to the full rescue mission.