Electrifying. I love the way it balances moments of complete control, when you can use your items to guarantee a good outcome, and moments of utter chaos, when you have no choice but to play your luck and pray for the best. Its one major flaw lies in math since, for every game state, there is always an optimal action that maximizes your probability of winning. The game deals with this by giving the player imperfect information, leaving them to rely on their flawed senses to remember which kinds of rounds have been loaded and shot. It works because it's short. Were it longer though, I could see the temptation to write it all down and calculate possible outcomes easily getting to me, dumbing down the uncertainty that makes the experience work

Oh, and I LOVE the use of color quantization here. The sound design also serves as a wonderful punctuation

Takes an understandable and well-defined base in the form of poker and amplifies its strategic possibilities through what I can only describe as a complete numeric overload. By stripping the roguelike and deck builder genres to their most essential aspects, Balatro is able to laser focus on what they do best, and that's providing a space for strategizing and improvising your way through both good and bad luck by way of gained control over deeply flexible systems. It doesn't need to reinvent the wheel to make itself deeply engaging. I really like it!

Played this for game club.

While I'm sure there are more creator-accurate ways to understand Gris, this is the kind of experience that would feel inauthentic not to evaluate through my gut feelings. To me, it speaks of futility. Of being stuck in cycles upon cycles of loss and rejection, creating art and performance that, no matter how true and profound, will always feel entirely inadequate. It's about changing your shape, looking for something, anything inside yourself that will make you feel complete and in control. And, ultimately, it's about letting go of that desire for control, understanding, and finding peace in the idea that there isn't anything you could have done to make yourself anything other than what you are.

I like that it doesn't use its varied and fun mechanics to do anything particularly extravagant. While Gris gives you a multitude of abilities that play very nicely with each other, a lot of the game consists of not using them and just walking around. It forces you to sit with your gut, which doesn't feel at all hollow, in part thanks to the intense and labored visual art and sound design. There's a lot to think about and the game wants you to dive head-first into it.

I liked it! At the same time, I feel like it isn't meant for me. Like there is a lot of depth and emotion that someone else, having lived a different life, would appreciate a lot more.