It took months, but I'm finally learning to love Cringe on Megabonk

It took me a while to jump on the megabunk train. I don't play many games on my PC, and my Steam deck has been sitting gathering dust for most of the last year, ever since the Switch 2 cover broke. It became my portable powerhouse, while not enough to keep me coming back to Valve's handheld. In the last two weeks, that changed.

Not a day has gone by recently where I haven't hopped on my Steam deck to play a couple of rounds of Megabonk or Ball x Pit – both of which are shockingly good at killing my time in the blink of an eye. But despite loving the bouncing of countless balls at the bottom of its most terrifying pits, there's something about MegaBunk that hits so hard.

Maybe it's the cute, retrofitted 3D visuals, the banging chiptune music, or the countless cool abilities and characters I've already unlocked. Hell, maybe it's even the cringe internet jokes that undermine every aspect of its identity.

Megabunk understands the beauty of embracing the cringe

I turned thirty this year, so I grew up in the golden age of cringe internet humor and online communities, where millennials huddled together for warmth in the Obama era. An age defined by rage comics, motivational posters, and 'XD' posted at the end of every message sent on MSN. YouTube was in its infancy when websites like Twitch barely existed, so we got our kicks on forums and prehistoric platforms like Skype. What a blast from the past.

While Megabonk isn't exactly reflective of this era, it fills me with the same kind of warm but slightly cringe-inducing nostalgia for when I was a kid and words like 'monke' and 'skill issue' were actually funny. When you die in the game you'll be met with phrases like 'you died – maybe he's a skill issue' without a hint of irony. The quirk chungus are phrases that are not meant to make sense, falling into a thick pool of sauce, either enticing players to enjoy it for hours or leading them to walk away in despair.

Megabunk is so weird it gets hilarious

There have also been complaints on the Steam forums, asking MegaBunk to remove its cringe internet humor, as if indulging in it makes the game too bad. At first, I was in the same boat, and found myself turned off from playing the game because, at every conceivable turn, you were met with meme-inspired characters or random pieces of text in the user interface designed to remind you that this developer spent a lot of time browsing the Internet. But, and hear me out here, if that's the whole point?

After spending a lot of time on Megabonk, I'm convinced that it's designed as a love letter to the internet age that we've long since left behind, but still clings to as it represents a simpler and more wholesome time. Where humor may derive from misspelling things, speaking in silly tones, or jokes featuring the same faces over and over again. Things are darker and more oppressive in 2026, and it feels like Megabonk serves as this wonderful reminder of how things used to be.

Megachad posing in the jungle of Megabunk.

Its use of cringe internet humor and over-the-top archetypal jokes is so prevalent throughout its presentation that part of me believes it must be intentional or self-aware. Even if it isn't, drawing one's own retrospective meaning from art is part of what makes it special. That, and seeing the numbers grow feels good on this thing. i like