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Remember the metaverse? I do, occasionally, when circumstances conspire to remind me. It will never not amuse me that there were two schools of thought during those heady days: Self-proclaimed super-genius Mark Zuckerberg renamed his whole damn multi-billion-dollar company after it, and PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon called bullshit. Guess who was right? (Hint: Not Zuck.)

Like a heart continuing to beat after the brain has gone silent, the multiverse of metaverses has quietly persisted, but bit by bit, those organs are starting to shut down too. Meta said in March that the VR version of Meta Horizon Worlds is closing in June, and now vtuber agency Hololive has announced that its metaverse project Holoearth is going away too.

"Since launching Holoearth we continued operations with the support of many users, but after careful consideration regarding the ability to provide service into the future we arrived at this decision," the Holoearth team said in the shutdown announcement (via Delisted Games). "We offer our sincerest apologies for being unable to meet the expectations of everyone who supported us, and we deeply appreciate everyone who found enjoyment through Holoearth.

"It is our hope that the myriad of experiences in Holoearth, the bonds formed among users, and the time spent in this world will remain with everyone as cherished memories. While the time remaining until the end of service is short, we hope you can continue to enjoy the world of Holoearth until the final moment."

The concept of Holoearth as a more immersive way for fans to interact with vtubers sounded interesting, and the popularity of Hololive—one of the biggest vtuber agencies in the world—gave it at least the potential to be a viable moneymaker, which was of course the real point of the whole thing. But it was somewhat limited, too: As we noted in 2025, for instance. Holoearth split vtuber audiences, which regularly number in the thousands, into instanced rooms of 50, which would commonly fill up quickly. Such relatively small groups might have also diminished the feeling of being in the midst of a big community of fans, one of the big attractions of Holoearth in the first place.

"Holoearth was created with the theme of 'another world,' and has strived to be a place where talents, creators, and users can connect and make new experiences that transcend the boundaries of the virtual dimension," Holoearth project lead Ikko Fukuda said. "The time you spent there, along with each encounter and memory, are precious to us, and will remain with everything involved in this project. Furthermore, the technologies and learnings cultivated through Holoearth will live on in Hololive Production's future efforts, helping pave the way to new experiences.

"There may have been some shortcomings on our part along the way—but even so, we are grateful that everyone continued to visit, enjoy, and support the world of Holoearth."

Well, that's certainly nicer than what we got from the Meta Horizon Worlds shutdown.

The "final moment" for Holoearth will arrive on June 28, when the service will be shuttered outright. Sales of the premium HoloCoin currency have already been halted, while the sale of "Holoearth premium items" and user-made items will end on June 3. Non-premium items will remain up for grabs until the service shuts down. Any Holocoin or Creator Points that are unused when Holoearth goes offline will be refunded.

Game developers are burning through genres, high concepts, and even annoying machines that scammed you on the boardwalk as a child to fuel quick-hit Balatro-likes or Vampire Survivors-likes at the same rate the smartphone industry's sucking down rare earth minerals. I get why: compulsive play is core to the design, they can be made relatively fast and relatively cheap, and a day or two on the Steam charts (or a viral Twitch stream or YouTube video) can drive 100,000 sales at a time when just surviving to make another game feels like a real win.

But good lord are there a lot of them. 257 new roguelites have dropped on Steam in the last 30 days, according to SteamDB, and even discounting the shovelware there are too many to keep track of. There are the deckbuilders, the action games, the… Minesweeper-likes? That tag doesn't even cover games like Far Far West that prioritize weightier descriptions—FPS, online co-op, loot—perhaps because that combination of words carries an innate implication with it. Of course a co-op horde shooter with randomized loot is a roguelite. Duh.

Perhaps this bite-sized style of repetitive play (with soothing metaprogression!) is what our fractured psyches are best suited to at the moment. They're the game equivalent of doomscrolling without looking up for four straight hours, most of that time wasted on glazed-over unblinking eyes except for the one really funny video that will stick in the mind (the game equivalent of a truly sick Balatro hand). At least we're playing "gambling" games instead of pouring the last dregs of our inflation-ravaged checking accounts into prediction markets, right?

I was ready to declare that I'm fully worn out on the format—that I hope we're nearing the bottom of the barrel for ideas that can be crammed like Play-Doh through the deckbuilder or Survivor mold—and then some jerk went and announced Pin-Crawl, "a dungeon crawling pinball rogue-lite."

Ah damn. Ah hell. As translator Stephen Meyerink posted on Bluesky where I first saw the game: I'm in danger. You're killing me here, Eddy.

BlogDer perfekte Stürmer: So spielen Sie erfolgreich im AngriffDer Geruch von frisch gemähtem Rasen, das leise Quietschen der Stollen, das rhythmische Ticken des Balles, wenn er von Fuß zu Fuß fliegt – wer als Stürmer auf dÖffnen →

Pinball is my kryptonite, or maybe more accurately the cheese you can bait a trap with to make me go all Monterey Jack. Is its pull diminished slightly by not being an actual, physical pinball machine? Sure! Nothing beats the real thing.

But in the same way that Balatrofying mahjong was a grave threat to my friend Baxter, the compulsive nature of crafting wildly multiplicative roguelite builds but with the trappings of pinball is like a lab-grown block of cheese bioengineered to my exact olfactory wavelength.

Pin-Crawl, which has a page on Steam but currently no release date, doesn't at a glance have the same pixel art and particle oomph as Xenotilt or Demon's Tilt, which are great (but more conventional) digital pinball tables. But Pin-Crawl has the roguelite twist, where upgrades start doing crazy shit like bombarding the screen with stars or triggering frenzied multiballs and "spells to give you a unique advantage against the dungeon's inhabitants." It has stats! Bosses! Meta progression, no doubt, that will make more exciting things happen the longer I play, even if I don't get any better at the actual pinball!

I want to say no thanks, I don't need any of that. But I can't. I do need it. I need it because I played Sonic Spinball as a child and haven't been entirely right since.

This is not the first game to put a twist of this sort on pinball: there's another one coming out this year, even. But more common, somehow, is the pinball metroidvania, which requires a bit more commitment and I think is a tougher sell. Pinball is better in short sessions, and metroidvanias need a bit more narrative pull to keep you engaged over the long term, a tricky marriage that in my experience only Yoku's Island Express has pulled off brilliantly.

Despite being a metroidvania, Yoku's Island Express is a breezy game, easy to polish off in a single weekend. I assume that whenever I play Pin-Crawl the weekend will instead evaporate, leaving me wondering where the hell 48 hours of my life just went—but at least I'll have one 3.6-billion point multiball combo to show for it.