With how many new games land on Steam every day, it would be easy to overlook Nubby’s Number Factory. The new roguelike strategy game from solo developer MogDogBlog Productions boasts an old-school aesthetic that feels like a throwback to the days of Windows 95 and browser-based Flash games. Lurking under the surface here, however, is a powerhouse of number-crunching that’s ready to sink its hooks under your skin in much the same way as LocalThunk’s Balatro, and it’s already proving a winner on Steam.
The premise of Nubby’s Number Factory is quite simple. You work at the eponymous establishment, and it’s your job to launch the ball-shaped Nubby down a board of pegs, each generating an additional score as you do so. Taking notes from the best roguelikes, however, the real strategy comes from the numerous items, perks, and character-specific traits that you can combine to send your early count of dozens or hundreds of points into the billions and beyond, in true Balatro style.
Manage to reach your daily quota, and you’ll be able to claim your pay, along with potential upgrades and the chance to spend your hard-earned wages on further bonuses in the Nubby-Mart shop. Fail to do so, and the sun will explode. No pressure, then. As you progress through a run, the value of your pegs increases – each bounce in a round earns you the score displayed on them, but halves the value for the next bounce until it reaches one, after which it disappears for that play.
As opposed to Ballionaire, which also adopts the Peggle-style format but has you place modifiers onto the board, the magic sauce in Nubby’s Number Factory is your list of items and perks that sit along the top of the screen much like Balatro Jokers. The Tardigrade gives you a 25% chance to double the value of a random peg whenever a peg’s value is halved, for example, while the Cactus drops a quill randomly from the sky to hit one additional peg for every five that are popped.
Progress further and you’ll find increasingly rare items, such as ones that will stack up additional score each time they are triggered, or that can mutate into others when certain conditions are fulfilled. Then you factor in perks, permanent additional upgrades that typically offer extra ways to use your items. The Eggy Perk force-activates all items that summon anything every time you reach 20 popped pegs, while The Void Perk triggers your rightmost item twice when Nubby falls off-screen, and repeats it for each empty inventory slot.
On top of that comes food buffs – a Donut will duplicate the last perk you picked up, the Kebab has a 50% chance to force-trigger the rightmost item in your inventory, and the Noodle mimics the most recent food item consumed. Stack all of those elements up, along with the base traits of the various ‘supervisors’ you’ll unlock and can pick between at the start of each run, and you start to see how those numbers can soar into the stratosphere.
Nubby’s first few days have already made a big splash for a game of its relatively modest stature. Currently, the game boasts the elusive ‘overwhelmingly positive’ rating on Steam, with 97% of the more than 1,300 reviews recommending it. “This week changed my life,” solo dev Ethan ‘MogDog’ writes in response. “I cannot believe that we’re sitting here with such positive ratings in the first ten days of release. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for the support. I truly love making games, and now I can focus on my passion full-time. Long live Nubby!”
For the future, MogDog says they are working on improving scaling and the restock feature, and is considering some further adjustments to place more weight on decision-making over RNG. Beyond that, version 1.3 will rework some of the more frustrating challenges, adjust character unlocks to be tied to experience rather than challenge completion, and is looking to add a “tentative” 12 items, 12 foods, and ten perks.
“This isn’t going to be the last of this sort of update,” MogDog explains. “I have a lot of ideas for items, and I really want build variety and clear build paths to shine more brightly than they currently do.” There’s a real charm to the existing aesthetic, and the satisfaction of building a good loadout is certainly there, with just enough pieces to the puzzle to create a real wealth of potential builds and strategies.
Nubby’s Number Factory is out now on Steam, priced at $4.99 / £4.29. There’s also a free demo you can download and try first if you’re curious. At such a low price point and with that immediately intoxicating gameplay loop of putting all the pieces together for that perfect ding-ding-ding payout multiplier, this is one potential sleeper hit that I could see quietly snowballing as the year goes on if the updates deliver.
It’s tough to beat the feeling of discovering a new hidden gem, so take a stroll through the best indie games on PC right now to look for more you might have missed. Then, practice your thinking skills in the best strategy games in 2025.
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