Great news! You too can develop a debilitating gambling addiction for only $15!

I don't think you could create a more addicting game if you tried. The pick-up-and-play element of this roguelite deckbuilder is so strong since it's based on poker, a game invented in the goddamn 1700s. For those of you keeping score at home, that's before we figured out how to synthesize cocaine.

And yet somehow, despite its simple origins, Balatro is just packed full of content. The game keeps throwing new shit at me left and right and I haven't even cleared the third stake yet. The satisfaction of making an absolutely busted deck setup is insanely gratifying, like what do you MEAN that I can score three million points by playing a single crumpled holofoil ace of spades with some red wax on it while the sound design and screen shake activate every neuron in my monkey brain. Is it legal to do that. I don't think it should be. This game needs like a Prop 65 warning or something.

Probably gonna continue playing this one until it stops having a Tetris effect (no not that one) like impact on my dreams. I woke up in a cold sweat last night because I was dealt some clubs when I needed hearts. That sounds like a metaphor for something. Hopefully Mercury isn't in retrograde or I might be in trouble. Maybe I should consult a psychic, or at least one of my goth friends who can read tarot and is a little too obsessed with astrology. Or perhaps I'm just a fool. I fold, cash me out dealer before I royal flush my life away.

Anyway good game. Don't even think about checking it out.

* Played perfectly on Ubuntu 20.04.6 via Proton 7.0-6.

Balatro is a game that caught my eye and immediately knew I had to play it. I’ve been a big fan of many rogue-likes in the past like The Binding of Isaac, and Enter The Gungeon, Though with Balatro, the idea of playing poker hands to score chips with a ton of different jokers that provide different effects, along with some deck building and alterations to essentially rig yourself for success seemed extremely appealing to me due to my history with poker. After around fifty hours with the game, I think it’s an interesting experience, let’s get into it.

Balatro was immediately very addicting and had a great sense of style with the CRT filter, the amazing music creating this laid back atmosphere, and generally nice visuals with pop and flair that never made it boring to look at. You play poker hands to score a certain amount of chips per blind, with eight innings in a given run, winning a run allows you to keep your build going in “Endless Mode” which I never personally delved too much into, but was fun to limit test my decks from time to time. It’s easy enough to understand quickly as well, play poker hands, augment your cards, buy stuff in the shop, find jokers to help make your deck or specific hands better as the chip demand increases per blind. It’s an incredibly simple premise with a lot of satisfaction seeing the numbers go up and watching everything work in tandem like a symphony. It’s no doubt this was fully why I was so enamored by Balatro and found myself playing for several hours at a time. Getting a good build going has that same knowledge requirement and experimentation as the aforementioned rogue-likes, so in this regard, Balatro hits it out of the park, while somehow being more approachable and simple comparatively as well.

It wouldn’t be Balatro without those trusty jokers though. There’s one-hundred and fifty of them in total, each providing a different benefit or effect that will change how you’re playing, and what you build towards. While not every Joker will be unlocked from the start, unlocking them is just as fun as using them I’d say, with a plethora of different unlock conditions for each of them. Others may require you to cater a run specifically to unlock them, but that’s hardly asking much considering their benefit for you in future runs once unlocked. While most jokers will offer you added multiplier and chips to help you clear ante’s, others are a bit more exotic in what they do. For example, “Even Stevens” is a joker that only adds multiplier to cards that are evenly numbered, to the much more niche jokers like “cloud nine” that will provide you a dollar per nine you have in your deck, which could influence you to add/create more nine’s to keep that economy engine going, which may have you running four or five-of-a-kind later on. This sort of snowball effect with jokers is very entertaining and practical for endgame scaling, it all works together very well, not every Joker can be a winner, and some Jokers you’d do well to help you early on, but abandon later due to their poor scaling. With that said, every Joker is a treat to not only look at, but figure out what it does and if you can include it in your build or not, that constant experimentation is what will keep this game alive far past its relevance. It doesn’t even end there as Jokers also have certain rarities that will augment the Joker to provide further benefits, such as additional chips, multiplier, or even an extra Joker slot, which can make taking certain niche Jokers far more viable and interesting.

If Balatro’s core gameplay is losing its luster, playing a new deck is always a good way to spice things up. Initially, Balatro will set you up with the Red Deck, which gives you one extra discard which is decent for a starting deck, but certainly not my first choice. Thankfully unlocking decks is relatively simple, and you’ll quickly have a decent selection you can pick from. The Blue Deck grants you an extra hand every round, arguably more valuable than the Red Deck’s extra discard. Yellow Deck starts you out with ten dollars, allowing you to potentially augment your deck and claim some powerful jokers early. While the first few decks grant you early advantages you can attain in any run, later decks will start changing the fundamental building blocks of the deck itself, as well as mechanics. From the tattered Abandoned Deck that has no face cards, to the appealing checkered deck that only has the spade and heart suits within its library. Every deck emphasizes a certain kind of play, adapting and recognizing them is half the fun, but are varied enough to keep the game fresh and interesting each and every time you make this decision before starting a new run. While the requirements to unlock later decks can be a bit demanding, they no doubt further change how you’ll perceive the game, as well as making specific setups, jokers, and cards far more valuable than they normally would be.

Difficulty in rogue-likes is a delicate balance of luck and skill, Balatro I think mostly sticks the landing here, with a few caveats. Balatro has multiple difficulties you can test your poker-playing skills against after you win a run with a specific deck. Each won run will unlock a new “Stake” which makes the game a bit more limited. From increasing the amount of chips to win per blind, to reducing your money-making, Balatro is rather creative and smart with how it limits the player without drastically altering the core gameplay. I think most of the difficulties here are very pleasant and force you to adapt to them without being frustrating or feeling unfair, which is very important to stress. It becomes even more important when you consider the fact every restriction each stake presents will continue to be applied to every stake afterward, making those last few stakes have a lot you need to keep in mind and strategize around. Let me be perfectly blunt here: Balatro stays incredibly consistent until you reach the Orange Stake. Originally, Orange Stake would begin to increase the price of booster packs incrementally each ante you cleared, by ante eight, the price of booster packs become ludicrous and not worth it. This made specific strategies entirely useless since there was not even a guarantee a useful card would be inside the myriad of different pack options the game presents to you. This further reduced valid strategies and would force players down the route of utilizing high card and pair builds since those hands were the most reliable to play. Without packs, rigging the deck in your favor basically became near-impossible and deeply frustrating. The ratio of luck and skill becomes heavily skewed in Orange Stake, which certainly did not leave me impressed, rather a lot of the flaws in Balatro became far more noticeable to me unfortunately. The reliance on luck to get a good run going was just far too inconsistent to me, and skill was rarely rewarded as much by this point, it certainly was… harrowing.

Gold stake was an even worse offender since it reduced your maximum hand size by one, making certain hands like flush and straight infinitely harder to pull off. All of this served to shatter any balance between luck and skill tremendously, and is by far the worst part of Balatro, or I should say was. Balatro has since been updated, making both Orange and Gold Stake have entirely new gimmicks that don’t fully fix the problem, but are ultimately much better for the game. Orange stake now adds “perishable” jokers which will lose their abilities after five rounds of use. There is a thirty percent chance of any Joker having this perishable sticker, so while it still involves some luck to not get every Joker with this sticker, allowing the pack avenue to stay open can allow for far more strategies and certain hand types to remain viable, which is a very significant improvement. Gold stake has had a similar change with “rentable” Jokers, these Jokers initially only cost one dollar in the store, but at the end of every round, they will charge you three. Not only does this once again not remove the luck factor, but it essentially prioritizes having a good economy or way to make money early, but still far better than what Gold Stake was before. Even with these changes, I think Balatro truly shines at its best on the easiest difficulty: White Stake, and when you’re simply able to have fun and enjoy the game without these restrictions. While the higher difficulties deserve their time in the sun, I don’t think they’re fully necessary to have a complete experience, but if you’re looking for a challenge, you’ll certainly get one!

Balatro does explore other avenues for challenge though, much like its contemporaries. Challenges that alter the rules of the game and force you to adapt to them are always a welcome addition to any rogue-like, and Balatro does a great job here. There are twenty challenges to sink your teeth into, and while they can’t all be winners, the few I had the pleasure of playing, I really enjoyed. Omelet was a particularly fun one, and the first challenge among the list where you will earn no money from any source except selling off cards, and you start with five “Egg Jokers” that increase in value every round. The idea is to sell them off only when you see something you absolutely want or need for your build, which I really liked, it made money far more valuable and really made you weigh your options rather than just burning money whenever you had it in the normal rules. This is just one example, but the challenges here felt very thought-out and valid to have in the game, while some of them can be a bit difficult to grasp or succeed in, it wouldn’t be a challenge if it wasn’t so.

I want to address a bit of controversy about Balatro in how it simulates gambling. The creator himself has denied this design philosophy, but admits the game does have risk/reward elements like any other Rogue-like would. I’ll be the first to admit Balatro became incredibly enticing and hard to put down for me personally, but The Binding of Isaac and Enter The Gungeon were even more so, with five-hundred and eighty hours, and over one-hundred hours respectively, Balatro barely cracked fifty. This is not to say these games are to be avoided or also replicate “gambling” but I do want to say these games are indeed very addicting, but for Balatro I also do not think it’s anywhere close to gambling, at least not any closer than a game like Vampire Survivors which was equally criticized for “replicating” something akin to a slot machine. While I don’t want to delve too deeply into this topic, just know upfront the game should not be affiliated with the negative contexts of gambling, but is certainly fun and hard to pull away from, but so are many other games, especially Rogue-likes.

Some closing thoughts on Balatro as a whole. I think the game is rather remarkable to say the least, while I think certain hand types like flush have far more supporting jokers than something like straight, the general balance and freedom to build whatever deck you want is very satisfying and is really refreshing to play if you’ve been stuck playing basic poker so long. Rigging the odds in your favor by improving your cards, copying them, or outright destroying them are all simple yet effective and provide enough decision weighing to make it very engaging each and every single time. I think the game hits the right difficulty mostly, orange and gold stake to me rely a bit too much on luck even after the changes to find them too compelling or fun, but I’d be doing a huge injustice to say it wasn’t damn satisfying to complete those stakes, much like going all-in when you’re sitting on four-of-a-kind in real poker. Jokers by themselves will define how you play and what you can build towards, but aren’t always so paramount to not experiment with what you can do in any given run, and most have general use to maintain that freedom of expression within deck building that is very much welcome, but also has room for oddly specific Jokers that can turn a simple run into a God run in just a few seconds. At first Balatro dug its hooks deep into me, though overtime it weakened its grip and has comfortably landed somewhere for me as a remarkable game, but not a masterpiece I once thought when doing my first handful of runs. Regardless, I enjoyed my time with Balatro and will be happy to boot it up for a few games every now and again, but certainly not grinding it like I once was. Thank you all for reading this shorter review on Balatro, I’ll see you all in the next one.