Played some Ballionaire
After seeing some conversation about Ballionaire, I checked it out. It's definitely a pachinko game!!
You select pachinko pegs with different powers and position them on the board. Then physics takes the reins; you have a lot less control over the stuff that happens on the board than in even a game like Peglin, it feels like. (I have no idea if this is empirically true or whatever. But it feels that way!)
I do like the possibilities present in the "loadout" element of this game a lot. You start with a certain set of parameters, and different scenarios will push specific subsets of pachinko pegs at you. These subsets synergize, and they test you on your ability to massage those synergies out of the physics randomness. You really can affect your chances of success by selecting the correct pegs and placing them near pegs that they synergize with. You really do have SOME agency.
The agency you have is definitely very mushy, though. There are loadouts I think will work - and I'll just get screwed by some weird bounces in the early game, before I have the ability to spawn or duplicate a lot of extra balls, and I'll find a strategy which shoulda been pretty solid failing in front of me for no reason I can control.
You do have just enough control to push a win, it feels like. But just little enough control that it makes you wonder whether you really pushed that win as much as it felt like you did. You share too much credit with the randomness of pachinko itself.
Here's the board I used to win the slot machine level. I deliberately constructed this board with a different strategy in each column. The left hand column got me massive Cave bonuses - the caves there give me more money each time more caves are hit by the same ball. The middle column gets me a ton of high value returns from the trees and bricks - each of them gets me more money if they are hit from below, and there are pegs here which bump balls up vertically to hit these pegs. The right hand column is kind of a mess but it does make good use of brooms and arrow traps to redirect balls toward the central column. I constructed these columns deliberately in order to get a really high point value, and I got that value, and I won the level. I feel like I controlled this!
I just didn't control it as much as I feel like I'm controlling, say, a game of Balatro, even though these gambling roguelikes are all pretty dependent on randomness.
Balatro just gives me a lot more opportunities to control and manipulate that randomness. There are builds I've put together in that game where I've stacked a couple Jokers to eliminate entire suits and all face cards all at once, which constrained the randomness I was exposed to so drastically that it felt like I'd completely changed what the game was about. (I didn't win in all of those cases... but I definitely felt like "how random this is" was really up to me.)
I don't think it's possible to afford the player that kind of control in a game which is essentially an action physics simulation, like Ballionaire. Once you submit to the physics simulation - particularly in a game like this, where so much is happening onscreen that it's hard to track visually - then I think you're stuck with a certain amount of this mushiness no matter what. And I had a bunch of fun, but I think that mushiness is just a lot less appealing to me.