Studio Okomotive is best known for the FAR games: two side-scrolling vehicular maintenance puzzlers that are somehow both tireless and tranquil, wordless and beautiful. I adored these games, so much so that their follow-up title, a herd-management simulator and picturesque grassy meadow odyssey called Herdling, was in my top three most anticipated games of 2025. If I had to describe an interconnection between the projects, it would be the vistas: resplendent sunbeams and cloudy skies stretching out to the summits of the pilgrimage and the raw ferocity of the elements borne by the ever-changing winds as you trek across the plains. The studio’s new upcoming title, PinKeep, is a pinball game. It’s very different.
I’m not a fan of skating games. Bear with me. It’s not that kickflips and grinds don’t look cool or that they don’t feel cool to pull off; it’s that skating around with self-directed goals and no strong incentive other than high point values has never been especially motivating for me. Some recent titles prevail over the lack of incentive by adding a more concrete purpose and pay-off for tricks: in Rollerdrome, weapon ammunition is reloaded through successfully executed maneuvers; in Skate Story, the stunts translate to hit damage on bosses.
In a similar vein, I’m not a fan of pinball. Same qualms. I don’t feel a strong drive to make the number go up when there is no other remuneration. It doesn’t help that I am very bad at pinball: apart from wildly flailing the paddles whenever the ball drops near, my strategy for success is limited mainly to the power of prayer. I love Okomotive and was ecstatic to try anything they put out, but I had a pang of fear during the first five minutes of the demo: is this just pinball? Have I railroaded myself into playing a demo for a basic pinball game?
PinKeep is, pleasingly, an equal combination of pinball and tower defense. The pinball gameplay is a means to gather resources and build structures to defend the mobile castle that is your keep, which moves from camp to camp along a branching path toward an end boss in a roguelike campaign. The fail state comes when enough invaders (defenders?) breach your hub rather than when all balls are lost to the abyss, which turns pinball into a gameplay medium for the purpose of defense rather than the end in itself, and this creative combination is a successful diversion.
In each encounter, various classes of soldier parade unhurriedly toward your tower as you observe the battlefield in a classic top-down pinball perspective. To defeat them, you must hit them with your pinball or build contraptions to hit them for you. At certain points you also have the ability to upgrade your ball to be flammable or more resource-rich, offering steady empowerment to guard against the gradually rising tide.
The encounters take place in a medieval setting, with suits of armor and archaic weapons and a relentless, playful marching theme of drums and flutes. The scenery and landscape are built of smooth and chunky shapes like a diorama made of clay. The tone is overall whimsical.
The game is early in development, and as fun as it can be to play for 20 minutes or so, it does feel like it is missing a hook. There are no characters to connect to, and there is no narrative to speak of, though those might not ultimately be necessary. The medieval setting, to me, feels a little generic for tower defense, and I’d be curious to see perhaps another or a variety of settings for the gameplay. I’m also not big on run-based mechanics—permanent loss of progress deters me, and I think the gamescape is oversaturated with these—but I make exceptions when a title stands out.
I also couldn’t figure out how to keep track of certain things like ball count or when my ball redirect ability had recharged, so there might be some ways the UI could be improved to telegraph these things. And… I still suck at pinball. In spite of all the upgrades and strategies available to me, I did not manage to beat the demo boss. I might like a mode where I never run out of balls, but then again I might not be the main target audience.
If you’re looking to relive the pure zen of the FAR games or the patient plodding companionship of Herdling, there’s very little of that DNA present in PinKeep, at least as it is now. Nevertheless, the game offers a novel blend of genres with a lot of potential. I will be eagerly watching to see what materializes at the end of its journey.
If you would like to try out PinKeep for yourself; then there is a demo available on Steam.
