Download link: The Twilight Zone VPX by Ninuzzu
It's easy to be bewildered by The Twilight Zone pinball machine, and also easy to become obsessed with it. It feels like anything could happen when you play it, particularly because there is just so much physical stuff on the playfield.
I've never actually seen an episode of The Twilight Zone, but I know its intro sequence, and I feel like I understand what its general vibe is. The pinball table is enough to make me appreciate it as a theme.
The dot-matrix animations and callouts are fun. (@FlannelKat uses some of them in her Twitch channel. This machine is where DON'T TOUCH THE DOOR comes from.) The voice narration all fits well enough to make you think that Rod Serling came back from the dead to record it, but it's actually Tim Kitzrow, the king of arcade machine voice acting, doing a spot-on impersonation of him.
I'd say that the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the design come from the same place: that you never know what might happen in your next game.
One of the addictive things about pinball is the feeling that you just need to play one more game, and do one thing better, and you'll accomplish a high-scoring goal. There's so much chaos in this game that it's hard to imagine playing "the same game but doing one thing better". You'll be playing a different game next time, unless you have the expert levels of patience and control to make a predictable game out of a box of chaotic mechanisms.
Let's talk about some of these mechanisms, starting with its completely unique gumball machine. You can open the gumball machine and shoot a ball into it via the right orbit. It will then dispense another ball. What's meaningful about this is that one ball is different: the POWERBALL. It's a slightly larger ball, made of ceramic instead of metal, so it interacts with all the mechanisms of the table differently.
When the game detects that it's dispensed the POWERBALL, it starts telling you "GIVE IT BACK" and "IT'S NOT YOURS" in a spooky voice. Shooting the ball back into the gumball machine gives you a multiball mode.
Or, you could mess up and lose the POWERBALL down the drain. At which point, that's where it is. Some later plunge -- maybe in a future game, maybe for a different player -- is going to plunge the POWERBALL, and create a new opportunity to get the multiball from it. It's hard to predict when this is going to happen.
Another mostly-unique mechanism is the "Fight the Power" mini-playfield on the left. Instead of flippers, it has magnets that you control with your flipper buttons to try to fling the ball into the hole at the top. This is hard.
A fun consequence of these mechanisms: you can shoot the POWERBALL into Fight the Power. At which point it just drops right out of it, because of course a ceramic ball is completely unaffected by magnets.
These physical mechanisms are what put the VPX recreation by Ninuzzu to the test, and it passes that test. The pinball feel like pinballs, the powerball feels like the powerball, and fighting the power is appropriately fiddly and difficult. (When I got it on my first try on stream, someone in chat suggested that must be a flaw in the VPX, but no, I just got really lucky and it was hard after that.)
Also from the VPX point of view: a problem with many VPXes is that they're too dark, either because the creator likes it that way or because lighting is hard to model and darkness is easy. It would have been so tempting to turn the lights down on this table, too, for atmosphere, and I'm so glad Ninuzzu didn't. You can see the table very clearly.
The Twilight Zone is a widebody pinball machine. It's easy to forget this. Usually a widebody machine has to have extreme wide-angle shots that you need to make, to justify the extra space. This machine, on the other hand, is pretty much a narrow-body layout, shifted to the right, plus tons of wacky stuff added to the left side of the playfield. It doesn't feel like a widebody, and that's generally a good thing.
I've watched a video on how to play The Twilight Zone well, making very particular shots to start multiball and score repeated jackpots with upper-flipper shots that zig-zag up the playfield. It's such an unintuitive layout that I always forget how to do it when the moment comes. If you miss, you're back to chaos.
The gameplay feels slightly outside my grasp, but it's a lot of fun to explore. I'll keep coming back to it until I can finally get a grasp on how to control this machine.