Oddball, corner pocket: Adult Swim announce Pool Panic
Balls to the wall
The latest from little indie outfit Rekim and to be published by anarchic cartoon channel-turned-games-publisher Adult Swim, Pool Panic is a game about living a life in the day of a jittering, gurning, animated cue-ball. Your mission: Explore a world of mystery, adventure and holes in the ground that you need to knock your fellow spherical kin into. Within, an announcement trailer that really wants to make sure you remember the title.
So, it's pool, but not at all realistic. There's mazes, and boss fights, and a world to explore, but you're primarily interacting with the world by smacking your white spherical protagonist with a long stick to aid them in their quest to smash other balls into the pockets. There's also multiplayer modes, and it doesn't appear that there's any kind of turn system, meaning that even in single-player, this is not a game of carefully considered mental mathematics.
It seems like a fun, dumb mix. Take a game that is simultaneously popular with drunk people, but also requires rapid and precise mental calculus, and remove most of the advantages that the calm, considered, more sober side of the audience enjoy. I've always been a fan of subverting sports/simulation stuff like this (see Triband's upcoming What The Golf? for a similar spin), and assuming the single-player side of it manages to keep up variety, I could see this being a lot of fun.
There's no solid release date on this one yet, but Adult Swim do tend to mean it when they say 'coming soon', so I'd be surprised if summer comes and goes without a launch. You can at least wishlist it on Steam if you want to be informed of exactly when it's landing, though.