As someone who grew up when pinball machines were commonplace in arcades – and lived through a spectacular phase of technological leaps, as pinball went through a bit of a renaissance in the 90s before sadly crashing – I’ve long been a fan of the physics based, massive high score chases that pinball provides.

Pinball and video games have a long history together too, with many excellent games adding touches to pinball based titles that wouldn’t be possible with real machines – or even cleverly merging genres while retaining a pinball-esque feel.

The Pinball Wizard is a game that does this really well; your titular magic user is on a quest through a monster infested dungeon, trying to retrieve a stolen artifact: the suspiciously pinball shaped ‘Eye’.

Each level of the dungeon is constructed as if it were a pinball table, with roaming monsters – acting like moving targets – bumpers and other obstacles too.

Each stage also has barrels marked with different symbols, which give you coins, replenish your health or your energy.

Your energy is used to activate special powers, such as a dash move – with which you can fire yourself in a chosen direction – or even summon a short lived extra ball, which you can aim when activating too.

Enemies have different weaknesses and attacks, so most of the time you’ll have to watch out for their offense and also, initially at least, work out how you can fight back.

There’s not many enemy types, so once you’ve got a certain way through the game’s 21 levels you’ll be very familiar with how to deal with each one.

At least until you reach the final boss, who’s waiting for you on the very last floor.

It’s all very well designed, looking and sounding fantastic – with lovely characters and animation, both for your wizard and the enemy monsters they encounter.

There’s some weird difficulty spikes in the level design, however – and at times it can succumb to the age old pinball problem, in that one unlucky bounce can lead to disaster that just feels out of your control.

By the time you reach the latter stages, the punishment for bouncing out of a stage is a stupidly high chunk of health, for example – and you can occasionally just be very unfortunate and lose within seconds.

Just like in the real thing, right?

It takes too long to get back into the game when this happens though; even if you skip the experience and cash counting after you lose a level, it still takes far too long to get back to the action.

Though cute, the wizard running up the steps at the beginning of each stage soon becomes annoying when you’re attempting a level over and over again, as does the brief cut scene that kicks off level 21 – which you’ll likely have to sit through a lot.

Those issues aside, there’s a sense that progress and levelling happens at a good pace, with a multitude of passive and active abilities that regularly unlock as you play.

There’s a daily dungeon to attempt each day too, though I expected this to be randomly generated each day – instead, it seems to be the same stage every day, but it is at least a good way to build up experience and money to level up your abilities.

Another two bonus floors are also available from the menu and thankfully, your floor progress in the main campaign is saved – so once you complete a floor, it does unlock the next one and you can start wherever you choose next time.

It won’t take long to get through the entirety of the game and unlock everything it has to find – my playtime of the game on the Steam Deck totalled around 2.5 hours at the point where I completed the main campaign, which includes playing the daily and bonus dungeons at different times too.

Yet it’s a charming little game with a few wrinkles; though it can frustrate at times, that’s not too different to actual pinball and its own problems – yet I still can’t resist the lure of the silver ball any time I happen upon a pinball machine in real life.

It’s also worth noting that I did persevere despite those annoyances and completed the campaign even as numerous levels, including the final one, made me turn the air blue with frustrated expletives.

So yes, it’s not perfect – but at a low price, The Pinball Wizard does provide a nice little distraction, even if it does carry one or two issues over from its pinball heritage.

The Pinball Wizard is available on Steam (I played it on the Steam Deck), Switch, Mac and mobile devices.