Boink

Money falls from cannons at the top of the screen. Your job is to build the contraption it falls through, so that by the time each note hits the floor it is worth considerably more than when it left the barrel. Boink is Lettuce Studios' physics-flavoured incremental, and it wears its premise on its sleeve.

What the loop feels like

You buy a bouncer, you place it somewhere on the map, and falling money starts caroming off it, gaining value with each bounce. Upgrades make the bouncers springier and the cannon richer. That's Boink.

When the machine feels tapped out, you rebirth the whole thing for unique permanent upgrades and start stacking again, nudging the contraption one clever configuration closer to absurdity. Also that's Boink.

The systems doing the work

The core is physics-based momentum applied to currency: cannon-dropped money bounces off player-placed bouncers, and each bounce multiplies its value, so the game is really a pegboard engineering puzzle wearing a clicker's hat. The layout stage is where it shines, the tinkering part where one well-placed bouncer turns a trickle into a stream, and the rebirth layer converts a finished machine into permanent unique upgrades for the next stack.

One honesty note: our mechanics research pass failed to identify the game, so the mechanical detail here is thinner than our usual entries, sourced from the criticism pass, the store record and community discussion.

Where it stumbles

The community's complaints are specific and consistent. There is no offline progression, so the machine only earns while the game is actually running, which undercuts the whole idle bargain and turns a background toy into a foreground commitment. Placing bouncers lacks grid-snapping and zoom, making layout work finicky and pixel-hunty, a real cost in a game whose pleasure is layout. And past the early setups, players report progression going stagnant, with the rebirth layer feeling restrictive and repetitive rather than changing the shape of the game. The community verdict leans toward not worth playing in its current state, and the early-access label is doing honest work.

Playing it today

Boink is on Steam, Windows and Linux, in early access, from Lettuce Studios. There is no mobile version, and our platform check excluded unrelated iOS seller hits. If you try it, go in expecting an early-access tinker toy rather than a long-haul idler.

The verdict

A good idea in a rough frame. The bouncing-money fantasy lands for an evening, the pegboard tinkering is genuinely fun while it lasts, and then the missing offline progress and fiddly placement start charging rent. Worth a look on a sale if you like building little machines; idler veterans will want more respect for their time.