The Indie Informer

Come forth and bask in the glow of victory! After about seven hours, I’ve won a run of the poker roguelike so enthralling it should come with a warning, Balatro. Given it’s replayable nature, I’m going to call that finishing the game. And honestly, I’m almost afraid to recommend it because, once you start playing, you aren’t getting anything else done. But my enthusiasm for the deceptively simple-seeming, deviously well-designed title has won out. So, if you pick it up on the strength of my unmitigated recommendation, feel free to curse my name when all your other work begins to fall to the wayside.

The intuitiveness of playing Balatro stands in stark contrast with how impossible it is to explain simply and fully (proof of a wonderfully compact and complex design.) It is a poker-inspired experience, though you don’t need to know much about the real game to get gud here. Each level offers three conflicts — called the small blind, big blind, and the boss — requiring me to score a certain amount of points by playing cards from my hand in familiar combinations.

As you might expect, a playing a pair of cards doesn’t net as much as three of a kind — at least at first. As I overcome each challenge and gain cash to spend in the store between bouts, I purchase cards that boost my chances of winning. Some, like jokers, are ability modifiers. They can confer bonuses like increasing my score multiplier or lend me an additional chance to discard useless cards. But I can only have five of these smiling helpers, so judging which joker will best help me during “combat” is fraught with strategy.

Other buyable collectables, like celestial cards, level up the combinations themselves, which can make a pair more valuable to play than a three of a kind, and that will mess with your head. Beyond that, there are tarot cards which govern everything from the creation of booster cards to giving bonuses to individual playing cards.

Which of these sleek scraps of paper I chose to collect often meant the difference between making it to a higher-stakes table and ending a run in failure. And in roguelike fashion, once I lose a game, I’m sent back to the begining with none of my hard-earned abilities.

The wonderful and terrible thing about Balatro is that, unlike with other roguelikes, I never got frustrated getting bounced back to the start. I almost always felt like I’d had the slate wiped clean of the web of synergistic collectables governing my ill-fated moves and this time, I was sure to succeed. Especially as my efforts in the game unlocked new perks or decks I could use when jumping back in. The combination of simple drag-and-drop controls and a continuous flow of numbers-go-up dopamine hits is irresistible.

You’ve been warned.