Pegs of Hell Demo

"This is a taste. The house lets you stand in the doorway for nothing, and you would be amazed how many people call that generous."

The board is the build

Pegs of Hell is a physics roguelike about building the machine that beats you. Every round you draft pegs and place them on the board yourself — permanently, spatially. A Bumper under a Splitter is a fountain of balls. A Trapdoor row with a Revenant at the end is an engine that re-arms itself mid-drop. A Magnet in the wrong column is a lesson. Then you aim, let the ball go, and watch what you built do the rest.

The rent multiplies every round. A build that only adds is already dead; one that multiplies is a run.

In the demo

• The Induction — eight short chapters taught at the table by the Devil himself: the drop, the board, the lanes, the elements, the arcana, burning, the economy and the collectors.
  
• Classic Run on eight floors — eight of the hundred authored boards, each graded by how many sockets it gives you and each with its own finish line. The fate trail shows where the ball will go; the rent shows what it has to be worth.
  
• Ring I of the Seven Rings — the Carnival of Folly: four tables, one ruler, one seal. The Fool talks you down every table in his own voice, and the descent's first decision waits on the landing below.
  
• Ten Steam achievements, Steam Cloud, and a save that stays yours.

What you are aiming with

• Nearly thirty peg types, from a Coin to a Portal, each with upgrade lanes — one that adds, one that scales with the length of the drop, one that gambles.
  
• Six balls, chosen per drop — the Plain house ball; the Shot, small enough to thread gaps a Plain bounces out of; the Lead, heavy and hard to push around; the Quicksilver, lively and slow to fall; and two you earn rather than ration: the Fireball, which detonates on every peg it strikes, and the Lightning, which chains from them. The right ball is a property of the board in front of you.
  
• Sixteen Arcana, the game's Jokers: passive cards that recontextualise every drop, fired in the order YOU arrange them. +4 before ×2 is not the same hand as ×2 before +4.
  
• Eight secret combinations that wake when the right cards sit in the right order. Nothing lists them until you have found one.
  
• Burning — every Arcana has an ultimate, paid for by dropping the card into the pit fire. Its power is eternal; the card is gone.
  
• Elements — Cinders and Coils charge Fire and Spark; a full meter detonates the board around the peg and hands you a ball of the same element to aim wherever you like.
  
• A fate trail that never lies: one physics implementation, deterministic, so the line the game draws is the line the ball takes.

The house

The Devil hosts. He narrates your drops, introduces every card that joins your hand in that character's own voice, reads the rent out, and at the end of a descent reads the whole run back to you — what you took, what you refused, and which decision decided your ending. The full cast is voiced.

Behind the door with the price on it

The full game opens the other six rings and their rulers, the House Table at the bottom of them, seven endings resolved from the choices you made on the way down, the Pit Boss and his shop, Collections Night, the Daily Descent, and all hundred floors. Wishlist it and Steam will tell you when the doors open.

"I will keep the chair warm. I keep everything warm."