Perfectly presented and finely tuned to be intensely satisfying with meaningful and sometimes mind-straining choices to be made. If I have any complaint, it's only that the given jokers unlocked near the beginning don't allow quite as interesting of game breaks as I'd prefer. I'm not the kind of person to beat this with every different deck in a million different ways and likely won't put in that many hours unless greater and more dynamic challenges come along so if the later unlocks do this more I'll have no way of knowing, but in this kind of game I am most interested in banging different mechanics together and seeing how the game interprets the combinations and attempts to still look like a functioning video game while you break it in every way you can possibly think of. There are of course ways to break the game and there have been people putting up absurd point totals since the beta, but I rarely get that "holy shit, THAT works??" feeling I love to get in a game like Isaac. That's not really a failing of Balatro, though, it's probably mostly a limitation of a straightforward number crunching game where it's really hard to let things break in a way that's more interesting than a number going higher than you'd expect.

Seeing the minority of negative reviews here saying it's no better than actual gambling games or exploitative mobile apps has been really eye-opening for me. I thought we always agreed the tactics those use were terrible for ruining lives and emptying bank accounts, but it turns out for a significant portion of people (even those whose opinions I'm otherwise interested in), it was a simple aesthetic distaste for animations, sound effects, and gameplay loops intended to light up your brain at a base level rather than reaching for more Intellectual pleasures. It's a repeat of Vampire Survivors: no matter how safe of an environment the design principles are used within, no matter the richness of everything else that makes up the experience (and make no mistake, this is much deeper than VS ever was), they see some sort of threat or great evil in the simple pleasures of a digital toy that contains the ruffling sounds of card pack foil or a flashing light or two.

If you ask me, this attitude is elitist nonsense masquerading as concern for the vulnerable.