This game gets worse as you play it.

In this game, you have three options during battle: which enemy you want to throw the ball at, where to throw the ball on the board, and whether you want to skip to the next ball and throw it instead. After throwing the ball, you watch as it bounces around randomly, building damage to deal to the next enemy and collecting gold to spend on upgrade between battles. You are given 4 options after every battle: which ball to add to your inventory (if any), whether to upgrade a ball, whether to heal, and, at times, which passive ability relic to add to your inventory. The imbalances in the various options available to the player become obvious after the first couple times seeing them, which becomes boring as you learn that some of them are just never worth it, and some of them are so important that you must pick them to even have a chance at the higher difficulties. As you encounter these worthless options over and over, you're left with a sense of disappointment the likes of which is rarely encountered in deckbuilders. The battle maps - of which there are few - range from braindead easy to nearly impossible provided you didn't prepare specifically for that battle far in advance. There is no way to know which battles you will encounter in advance.

Every patch that has come out for this game since I've owned it has made the game easier, and it's still unbelievably stacked against the player, as most of the endgame difficulty comes from reducing the players' ability to make decisions at all. Less gold for upgrades, fewer upgrade options presented, more unavoidable damage that necessitates spending precious, dwindling resources on healing instead of deckbuilding. A common sentiment amongst the experienced players is that the highest difficulty comes down to luck regarding the options presented within the first few maps, and not finding a broken synergy within the first roughly sixth of the run means the player should probably save their time and just restart. Another common strategy is to exit the game entirely (save scum) to reroll relics. I checked the official discord to gather tips, and a very obsessed player had shared a spreadsheet of which relics they most frequently used to beat the game. The developer had commented "oh wow, I never would have thought to ask for this!" Seeing that come from the person supposedly in charge of game balance astonished me, that a game developer wouldn't have considered how players beat their game.

I've sat here for hours, trying to beat the game on the highest difficulty and rarely ever making it halfway. It's in the nature of the game to zone out. Throwing the ball, releasing the little control I have over the gameplay, and watching it bounce, fails to activate any neurons after over 800 runs, 90% of which end in the same first little section. My mind wanders and I no longer think about the game. Instead my mind turns to the same dark thoughts I play games to escape. I think of disappointments through my career. I think of my lost loved ones. I see myself from a bird's eye view, sitting here like a pachinko addict, staring at a screen, trying to make the lights show me an arbitrary pattern I might find satisfying for a moment or two.

Assuming I live to be 75, like all those zombies at the slots in Vegas, I'll have lived roughly 657,000 hours in my life. I've wasted so many of them on terrible games like this, when I could have spent those hours being productive in various ways. I could have spent them studying, or building practical skills. I could have spent them talking to my parents or playing with my pets. I could have even spent them on different games, ones in which I can communicate and compete with other people, or experience a moving story or imaginative visuals. Instead I spent those hours on Peglin, a game so unsatisfying it's made me rethink gaming as a hobby altogether. I don't recommend it.

This game does not feel like it's worth $20 in my opinion. It's not a bad game, I just don't think it has enough in it. If it's worth it to you, cool. I am happy that you got something that is worth the amount of money for you. No shade.
The things I do not like about the game are:
1. The game length. It is kind of short all things considered. You only have three levels and you can't go back to the first level and then play again with the items again like you could do in Risk of Rain 2.
2. The game has too much luck-based stuff to the point where if you just got a little bit unlucky, you basically have your whole run ended because oh no you didn't get that one item that would have actually been really helpful or That ball that you really wanted to be in the spot is not in the spot that you want it to be.

Poorly balanced game, repetitive gameplay, the RNG makes the game feel extremely frustrating as it takes forever to get a run going beyond zone one at higher cruciballs, and I could go on and on, but don't buy this game, it's not worth it at all