This game has been doing the rounds on the streamer circuit for literally months now as the solo developer (this is his first game, by the way!) has slowly trickled out a series of tantalizing time-limited demos, and today, at long last, it is out in wide release for all to play and enjoy (across Steam, Switch, Playstation, and Xbox)! To say that I am pumped is the understatement of the year :D
So what is all this Balatro nonsense, exactly?
The shortest possible version is that it is a poker-based deckbuilding rogue-like (or perhaps -lite, fine, fine), but that wildly undersells everything going on in this incredible game.
The initial presentation is quirky enough, but fully within recent trends in indie gaming – a slightly desaturated CRT-emulating playing field of avant-garde pixel-art cards, complete with mock screen jitter and a strangely hypnotic but very pleasant soundtrack – and the Joker-led tutorial gets the basic rules cleared up pretty quickly, then gets the heck out of the way, mercifully.
The goal of each run is to beat a series of successively tougher Blinds (rounds) across an escalating series of Antes (levels), each of which is capped off by an extra-tough Boss Blind. To defeat a Blind, you need to accumulate a target number of Chips by playing classic poker Hands – Pair, Full House, Royal Flush, etc. Each Hand has a base Chip value and a Chip Multiplier, and each card that “counts” in the Hands that you play also adds its face value to the Chip count before the Multiplier is applied. Tougher, rarer Hands are, of course, worth more. Cards are drawn into your hand of pickable cards 8 from a standard 52-card Deck, and you are by default allowed to play up to 4 Hands and discard 1-5 cards up to 3 times per Blind/round, enabling you to look for key cards. You’re awarded money for defeating the Blind and get bonus cash for unused Hands as well as interest for money you had in your bankroll already.
And once you’re past that first Blind, things open up substantially as you’re introduced to the by-now standard roguelike Shop. Here, you can primarily buy:
- Jokers – Special cards, of which you’re allowed to hold up to 5 at a time, that create wild special effects, like giving you bonus Multiplier for every Club you play, letting you make Straights and Flushes with only 4 cards each, multiplying the Multiplier by 1.5x for each other Uncommon Joker (oh yeah, they’ve got rarities, baby) in your possession, or simply earning you a little extra money every round. Jokers can also have enhancements, like the legendary Polychrome (it multiplies your multiplier by 1.5x on top of whatever else it does) and Negative (doesn’t count against your limit of 5 max Jokers) buffs;
- Vouchers – Permanent passive buffs that add lasting effects like a permanent ongoing Shop discount or an extra playable Hand each round; and
- Booster Packs – Semi-randomized packs that let you pick one (or two, for the pricier ones) from several assorted cards; there are various types like Celestial (upgrade individual poker Hands’ base values), Tarot (lets you upgrade/modify/remove individual cards in your deck), Buffoon (contains randomized Jokers), Standard (extra, mostly normal playing cards to add to your Deck); and even Spectral (wild, gigantic double-edged sword effects like nuking 5 cards from your deck for $20).
You can also opt to Skip the Small (starting) or Big (second) Blinds of a given Ante/level, generating Tags that grant you benefits. Some Tags are delayed, like one that gives $15 after you beat the Ante’s Boss Blind, or one that doubles the effects of the next Tag you earn, while others are immediate: by Skipping a given level (and its associated monetary bounty and opportunity to go to the Shop), you are immediately given 2 random Jokers, get to open a free pack of Spectral cards, etc.
The Boss Blinds each apply a unique hindrance or constraint to the normal game rules. One “Debuffs” all Heart cards in your deck – while they can be used to assemble a legal hand (e.g., if you have 2, 3, 4, and 6 of Spades, and the 5 of Hearts, you can still play the straight), they don’t count towards scoring, and don’t “activate” Jokers that normally key off of them (for instance, if you had a Joker that gave you bonus Multiplier for each Heart played, they wouldn’t count). Another limits the number of cards you can hold by 1, making it tougher to build and play viable Hands. Another forces you to play the same Hand type for each Hand you use in your battle against it – sure that 5-of-a-Kind got you a ton of chips, but can you scrape out another one to finish the Boss off with? These get pretty wild, and a couple of them are very obnoxious, and many of them will directly counter certain deck archetypes. Luckily, you’re shown what the Boss Blind will be at the start of each Ante, letting you try and prepare.
Defeat 8 Antes in a row to win a run. Along the way, you’ll be unlocking more and more Jokers to appear in Shops in future runs (there are 150 total), as well as new starting Decks (which come with their own unique bonuses and penalties: one omits all Face cards, limiting total Chip values but making some Hands easier to assemble; another grants you a free Double Tag each Ante to amp up the next Blind Skip action you take), and increasingly unfair difficulty levels (akin to the classic Ascension modifiers from Slay the Spire or Heat levels from Hades). There’s even an option to unlock the entire “collection” of goodies at any time you want, although doing so will disable Achievements for that save file.
Pretty swiftly, you go from sweating out whether you can amass a measly 600 chips to defeat the first major Boss Blind with all your Clubs debuffed to blowing out the final Ante with Hands that score in the billions of chips, if you can amass a sufficiently broken pool of power-ups and bonuses.
And that’s where the real joy of the game lies: as you play more and more, you start to recognize increasingly unhinged, batshit combos and synergies and see how best to game the Shop and Blind Skips to eke out just the right benefits to break the game wide open. But of course, it’s poker baby! Sometimes, there’s gonna be bad beats, and you’ll draw the one useless fucking 2 left in your deck instead of any of the fourteen bonus’ed up 10s you needed to complete your Full House. But after a quick summary screen and some light taunting from the game’s Joker mascot, it’s right on to the next game, on and on, forever.
Anyway, this absolute gem of a game is merely $15, or less if it’s on sale on your preferred platform, so get thee to a virtual casino, dammit!
