New hot roguelike indie deckbuilder roguelite Balatro just came out. I kind of like this genre because it tends to be good for Games to listen to music to! The problem is, there are one hundred thousand games of this genre coming out every single day, and every one of them gets more hype than it probably deserves. I guess it’s the “in” thing to try and become the next Slay the Spire.
Usually I have a little bit of fun with one of these for a little while and then drop it forever. I just played Balatro for the first time and it feels like it might actually have staying power! It’s sort of a score-attack poker that lets you gradually fuck with the deck to increase your odds of certain card combos.
I’ve never gotten into poker, and tbh one of the benefits of this game for me is that it’s forcing me to finally memorize poker scoring, lol. Maybe this skill will help me in real life some day. Anyway, I was pretty skeptical of this game because on its face it looked to me like too much of a dry math exercise. That kind of thing just doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t want to study or calculate more than needed!
Well, it is pretty mathy but the game does a good job of easing that by kind of doing a lot of the math for you. And so far it seems like you don’t have to be a statistics master to get through the game (though there are stats oriented screens you can get to that frankly scare the shit out of me). There’s more thematic flavor to the game than I expected – the psychedelic CRT aesthetic seems corny on paper, but in practice it actually works. It’s sort of a heightened, surreal version of a super-sleazy video poker game, makes me feel like I’m in some kind of telepathic alien gambling den or something. Cool music too, though I fully expect to mute the game and play my own music after a few runs.
The deckbuilding mechanics are the real hook here. In my first run I ended up leveling up my flush scoring, attempting to increase the number of diamond suite cards in my deck, and adding modifiers that gave me bonuses for each diamond I played. It meant that if I was lucky I could faff around with discards and shitty turns until I managed to get a huge diamond flush going and score ridiculous points to progress to the next “blind.”
It’s kind of neat. I’m just getting started but so far I recommend it if you like this sort of thing.