I mean, that’s pretty much it. I did exactly what it says in the title. Thank you for coming.

Okay, I’ll expand a bit. Trick Shot Simulator is a ridiculous game, and that’s the point. It’s all about replicating those silly TikToks you see of someone bouncing a ping-pong ball off pots and pans into a plastic cup or throwing a playing card at high speed so that it lands perfectly inside a clip.

It’s simple. It’s pointless. It’s genius.

All The Attempts Without The Effort

Let’s admit it: we all want to try those trick shots when we see those videos. We wonder just how difficult they could actually be, maybe even falsely assume we could do it, and think about how much fun it looks. But nobody wants to pull the kitchenware from the cabinets and bulk order a bag of ping-pong balls. It’s probably fun, but I’m not picking up a whole deck of cards only to find that one is stuck under the fridge.

That’s where Video Games™ come in; with Trick Shot Simulator, I spent an hour and 16 minutes rolling over 2,500 marbles along a table, trying to get just one of them to land on the central dot of a fifth side of a dice. The best part of this wasn’t the satisfaction of finally achieving it, nor the joy of that oh-so-long hour, but the fact that I didn’t have to pick up 2,500 marbles afterward. I’d rather just leave them on the ground and go on living my life in a room designed by Kevin McCallister.

One Of Those Wonderful, Thoughtless Games

I then went on to throw 300 ping-pong balls at a cup, 1,000 coat hangers at a pole, and 1,100 playing cards at a table, and the hours just rolled on by. I could probably be doing other things with my time, but what if the next throw is the one? And then why don’t I just take a quick look at the next level?

It’s such a simple game, and it has a good few levels to work your way through - and at this rate, it’s going to take me dozens of hours to clear them all, let alone set any records. With some of them, I look at the level pictures and already dread them. Moving contraptions and consecutive tricks? I might slowly grow more numb as the hours roll by, but at least I’ll be relaxed. Mostly.

Minus a few moments of crashing out, but those subsided quickly.

For £5 and a very basic premise, it’s a fantastic little title to add to your Steam library and play for a few minutes hours at a time. I’m not sponsored by Trick Shot Simulator (unless they would like to call me), so I’ll give you this for free: play it. It’s brilliant.