Games worth discovering

I’ve found the next roguelike I’m going to spend hundreds of hours playing

2K View2024-02-20

Balatro

9.1

Pixel GraphicsCard BattlerDifficultTurn-Based StrategyStrategyProcedural GenerationTurn-basedRoguelike Deckbuilder

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SHOULD I PLAY BALATRO?

Whatever you do, do NOT play Balatro...at least, not until you’re ready to become obsessed with it and sink dozens of hours into one of the most deceptively complex and addicting roguelike deck-builders I’ve ever played. Balatro takes the basic rules of poker and turns the challenge of finding the best poker hand into an absolute art form that grows endlessly more complicated as runs progress. With hundreds of unlockables, bonus challenges, and deck types to discover, there’s enough here to keep the obsession burning long past the point of being healthy.

TIME PLAYED

I devoted an embarrassing twelve hours to Balatro over the past week—embarrassing not because I didn’t enjoy it or the game doesn’t deserve it, but because I kept returning to the game instead of doing other important stuff like packing for my upcoming move or attending work meetings or...sleeping. Oops. For what it’s worth, even with a dozen hours spent playing, I’ve only managed to win two runs so far, and the game stats page says I’ve only unlocked fourteen percent of the total collection.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT BALATRO?

• Familiar rules twisted to new ends. Almost everyone has played poker at some point in their life, so the initial buy-in to Balatro is pretty low. If you know how to look for straights, flushes, and full houses, you’ll have no trouble getting started here, and if you don’t know how to do that, well, it’s not hard to learn.

Balatro’s true brilliance is in how it expands on those simple rules, though. Each level in the game (termed as a “blind”) challenged me to rack up a high enough score within a certain number of hands. Boss blinds added in more quirks, such as making all cards of the diamond or spade suit worth zero points, or forcing me to always select a hand of five cards no matter what hand I was playing. And as I progressed through blinds and “antes” (a set of three blinds), I needed to get higher and higher score totals, forcing me to think outside the box and look for ways to manipulate the system to my advantage.

• Joker’s wild, baby. Speaking of manipulating the system to my advantage, meet the real star of Balatro: the joker. In between blinds, I could visit a shop and spend money I had accrued to purchase jokers. The game has 150 different kinds of jokers, each of which tweaks the rules in some way. For example, the most basic variety of joker added four to the multiplier for every hand, while the Lusty Joker added four to the multiplier for every heart card I played. The game introduced increasingly wild joker variants as I played, pushing me to find new strategies for higher scores. My personal favorite, the Baron, multiplies the multiplier for each hand by 1.5 for each king still held, a rule change that urged me to draw but not play as many kings as possible.

I was able to hold up to five jokers at a time, and the real draw of Balatro was discovering new strategies and ways for those jokers to interact and boost each other’s effects. I’ve attempted dozens of runs now, and even though everything comes back to those same basic poker hands, every run has felt different, both because different jokers popped up in the shop and because my understanding of how to get the most out of these goofballs has grown. At this point I’ve only unlocked 70 of the 150 jokers available, so I’ve still got lots to learn.

• Deck and difficulty options. Jokers aren’t the only source of variety in Balatro either. The game has fifteen different starting decks and seven difficulty modifiers that can be applied to each of those decks for increased challenge. Some of the deck changes are small, such as starting with an extra discard or beginning the run with more cash to spend at the store. Others provide much more impactful changes, such as the black deck, which allows you to run six jokers instead of five but gives you one less hand to hit the required score during each blind. I can see myself experimenting with different decks and challenge options for a long time to come.

• Cool vaporwave aesthetic. Balatro’s visuals aren’t particularly mind-blowing—the unique art for each joker type is nice but, you know, it’s just cards. However, I did appreciate the chill music and fun VHS tape filter that runs on top of the game. You can turn the effect off if you want, but I enjoyed it; it brought back memories of booting up Windows 95 solitaire on an old CRT monitor as a kid.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT BALATRO?

• The usual roguelike randomness warning. As with any roguelike game, sometimes success or failure is out of your hands. I definitely had some runs where I was simply offered really bad (or badly matched) jokers, or where the first couple boss blinds were particularly brutal and difficult to overcome. Add that on top of the usual randomness of drawing from a deck of fifty-two playing cards, and inevitably things just aren’t always gonna go your way. If you’re not a fan of that element in other roguelikes, be warned that it’s a part of this one as well.

• Having to do other things. One huge design flaw I’ve noticed in Balatro is that once I started playing, I only wanted to keep playing, but for some reason I’m still expected to do other things? If developer LocalThunk really wanted to improve on what they’ve got here, they could consider patching in the option for the game to clean, feed you, do taxes, and take care of pets while you play. Just an idea!