been thinking a lot about why balatro doesn't super work for me

i think its because if you have bad luck, you are unable to win a run. if you roll badly you will hit a wall that you can not scale regardless

when i think about all the roguelikes/lites i adore there's an element of "even if i have the worst possible luck, if i play well enough i can still win". hades, spelunky, even something like into the breach

whereas with balatro, there have been a serious chunk of runs where i get to ante 4/5 and just think ... i will 100% lose and there is no point in me continuining this run

the other thing is that, to me, the core gameplay of playing cards isn't that enjoyable

shit man am i a balatro hater???

ultimately i think its an astonishingly polished game with a loop that makes only a quarter of runs feel worth doing

i love eastward so i love this a lot, and it does a lot of clever tedium-cutting-out. the graphics and UI and audio are all fantastic of course

that said, i don't know if it hit the perfect timing and balance with its core loop. its very possible to end up with nothing to do but skip days until you get certain NPCs arriving to round off the recipe book, with no real incentive to keep the farm going, which was a bummer and sort of soured the end of an otherwise very fun very cute experience

none-the-less a very good audiobook game

there's a bug where the game plays faster if your monitor has a high refresh rate

so i played the whole game on 2.5x speed

and honestly? it ruled. more games should be 2.5x faster than they should be