nubby's number factory first impressions
Nubby's Number Factory is a plinko-style roguelike inspired by Peggle which I first heard about at Summer Games Done Quick 2025. 1 It is a singleplayer game with a 97% positive rating on Steam. 2
At first, other than the bizarre art style which I quite like, it doesn't seem like Nubby's is much to talk about. It's yet another number-go-up game, difficult at first and then bursting open with strategy as you learn how the systems work. But, unlike most other similar games I've played, you soon realize that the entire point of the game is about completely breaking the scoring algorithm with the synergy of items you obtain. This is unreasonably fun -- who doesn't like the sheer joy of feeling like you're getting away with it -- and the game even embraces this by showing you the message "You broke the game" when you max out the restock combo in a round.
The supervisors, or game modes, help push you into finding the many different ways to break the game so that you don't get stuck focusing on one specific set of items. One set of items might give you an infinite combo, while another will flip the entire premise of the game on its head by making you prioritize avoiding as many pegs as possible. The fact that this amount of variety is managed with such a small cast of items is something that I quite love.
However, once you break the game, it's basically guaranteed that you'll win, and you end up sitting around waiting for the machine to finish crunching your numbers which is really boring.
I can't help but feel like Nubby's could have done much more here, in the same direction as the idle game Universal Paperclips. Once you figure out how to break the game, it would be cool if the game opened up another stage of mechanics. It would be really neat if there was a stronger thematic storytelling aspect to the game, with a commentary on the nature of generating higher numbers. None of this exists in the game and I feel it's a big missed opportunity.
The game is enjoyable enough that I wanted to get all of the achievements for the game, but the pursuit of it quickly soured my experience. The trial challenges get increasingly difficult, but in ways that seem to restrict the number of possible solutions until it feels like it's almost entirely up to luck. Perhaps it's just a skill issue on my part, but the creative freedom of finding ridiculous combos seems to quietly disappear as you do the more difficult trials.
Even if I did beat all of the content in the game, I would have to grind for a paltry 10 stars per game in order to unlock all of the skins in the warehouse -- and I would need to earn 1,425 of them to unlock all of the skins.
I never managed to beat the 5th trial, much less unlock all of the content, but I'm no longer enjoying the game and it's hard to maintain a favorable opinion of it now, even though the earlier content was great. I think if you want to enjoy this game, it's enough to play all the supervisors and the challenges (minus the trials) before stopping.