Winexy: the wooden ball catches fire, the metal one rolls on unscathed

Even players who steer others away from the game grant it one thing: every ball behaves like the stuff it is made of.

Maze, time trial, puzzle — one ball will not do for all of them

A wooden ball that crosses the fire catches fire, and it can set other things in the level alight. Put a metal ball under the same flame and nothing happens. That difference in material is what drives Winexy: each ball is made of something else, with its own physics, its own look and its own abilities, and the levels ask you to think about that when you pick one. Pick wrong and a level that was a simple run against the clock turns stubborn — you start over without knowing why.

The levels do not run on a single formula either. One stretch is a run against the clock, the next a maze, the next a puzzle, and what separates one from another is structure, not just mood or colour. Heaven Brotherhood made the game, GrabTheGames publishes it, and it reached Steam on 13 January 2017 as an independently produced casual adventure. The store page promises controller support — a detail that any player on a pad will feel differently further in.

The studio's latest post has moved on from Winexy

After launch, the studio gave the game exactly one post, dated 15 August 2020: new levels, a rebuilt engine, fixed checkpoints, softened obstacles in the maze levels and in the water levels.

Write-ups published in 2026 still describe the ball dropping out of the floor in that same water level — the very stretch that the 2020 update claimed to have softened. Go in there and you still feel the jolt the fix was meant to take away.

The studio's most recent post on the game's page, dated 3 June 2026, has nothing more to say about Winexy: it asks players to wishlist the studio's next project, a survival game set in a bygone age of steam and gears — smelt ore, mix gunpowder, build weapons.

The player with 127 hours who wrote the workaround guide himself

Among the write-ups left on Steam, the people who warmed to Winexy tend to be the ones who expected little from it. One player with 127 hours in the game went further than playing it: he wrote a guide of his own, explaining how to get past what gets stuck, because the studio never did. It is the kind of flaw you forget the moment the next level starts.

A Turkish write-up, posted after an hour of play, praises the variety the different materials bring to the levels — the mix of runs against the clock, mazes and puzzles — while admitting this is not a game to come back to every day. A Russian player, seven hours in, summed it up as an unpretentious ball-rolling simulator, close to the phone games of his childhood, with nothing to complain about.

The camera the on-screen hint promises to turn

On the side of those who advise against it, the controller support promised on the store page runs aground in practice. A Brazilian player, writing on 4 July 2026, puts the problem plainly: you can play with a pad, but moving to the next level after finishing one, or restarting when the ball jams, sends you back to the mouse. Another player, who describes himself as a fan of ball-rolling games, wrote on 26 September 2026 that an on-screen hint promises camera rotation. So there you are, swinging the mouse in circles after a control the hint itself says exists, and never finding it.

A German player, on 20 September 2026, liked the idea behind the different materials but found the visuals too plain and the soundtrack unbearable, with not even a volume slider in the menu — and he noticed that even the presentation video on the store page shows the game poorly. A Spanish write-up from 29 August 2026 concludes that the game sits better on a phone than on Steam, and that its interest ran out along with the prologue.

Even a flat thumbs-down grants the idea its due: a write-up from 13 September 2026 says few games attempt what this one attempts, but that the level design misses more often than it lands, and that the achievements stay locked. Another player reports, on 18 August 2026, that one water level drops the ball endlessly, and the level seizes up with no way to begin again.

Who clears the water level, and who quits in it

Winexy sorts players into two camps within the first few minutes. One tolerates breakage and takes the game for one more puzzle — the sort who becomes the player with 127 hours writing his own workaround guide. The other arrives expecting a finished PC game and gives up at the first water level, where the ball falls endlessly and there is no way to start over. If a pad is all you play with, you will learn early that the mouse stays mandatory for what matters: changing levels, prising the jammed ball loose.