It's pinball alright. Even if the cover art is Mario playing Break Out, this is for sure pinball. One board, two screens, no music. It's fairly straightforward and primitive. After 100,000 points the flippers become invisible.

Other pinball offerings on NES include Pinbot and Highspeed which are brilliant on a technical standpoint. Pinball Quest is ambitious at its best and enduringly painful at its worst. Rollerball has its frills and is probably the logical step up from this Black Box Pinball game.

All that rambling to say there are many options to scratch your pinball itch on the NES depending on what you're in the mood for.

This game was developed in Moscow therefore Russian is its original language. I can't speak or read Russian; whether it's better written in that language I'll probably never know. All I can say is that the English script really failed this game. The experience is only an hour long, and it's painful that the narrative doesn't accomplish much of anything in that hour. The music is fine. The interactive minigames are fine. The illustrations are sometimes phenomenal and the cozy atmosphere built by them is probably the game's only selling point.