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High Roller Penny Demo Is Available Now on Steam
Kniv Studio has released the first playable demo of High Roller Penny, letting players get hands-on with its unusual mix of pachinko physics, roguelike progression, and extremely questionable financial decisions. The free demo is available now through the game’s official Steam page, with the full release still listed as coming soon.
High Roller Penny casts players as a heavily indebted protagonist kidnapped by Penny, a bunny girl working within Yami-pachi, a shady underground gambling organisation running life-or-death games. The solution to all that debt is naturally to gamble even harder.
Players build customised pegboards using different balls, pegs and passive effects before dropping their chosen ball and watching the score climb with every collision. Reach the required score, and you survive another round. Fall short, and the consequences are considerably worse than losing a few chips.
The High Roller Penny Demo Adds More Ways to Bounce
The demo provides an early look at how much variation Kniv Studio plans to squeeze out of a seemingly simple ball drop. Players can experiment with regular balls, smaller variants, bowling balls and bouncy balls, while different peg types can generate shockwaves, multiply, launch objects into the air and create increasingly elaborate scoring combinations.
Tickets earned along the way can be spent on stronger balls and pegs, encouraging players to build around different synergies as each run progresses. The game also features an economy built around risk. Items can be sold when money gets tight, including tickets, pegs, and even the balls that form the foundation of a build.
That can provide a quick financial lifeline, provided players can actually recover from whatever they just sacrificed. The new demo also introduces another bunny girl to face as part of Yami-pachi’s High Roller games.
Kniv Studio Moves From Tactical RPGs to Pachinko
High Roller Penny is quite a change of pace for Kniv Studio, whose previous project was STARDUST: Wish of Witch. We previously took a look at STARDUST: Wish of Witch when its playable demo arrived, showcasing a more traditional tactical RPG built around grid combat, cards, and pixel-art presentation.
Its latest project trades all of that for gambling dens, physics-driven scoring and roguelike runs, although the studio’s emphasis on striking 2D presentation remains easy to see. High Roller Penny is currently in development for PC via Steam. A release date and final price have yet to be announced.
