This game is amazing. It's one of the best roguelike games ever created. Ever since I first played the demo for Steam Next Fest I knew this one was special. Now that the full release is out and I've put in over 20 hours already, including many "I can fit just one more round" moments; I'm hooked.

The concept is so smart using poker hands and deckbuilding/hand manipulation to score. There's an awesome balancing act between going for specific hands, chips, and mult. It's incredibly satisfying building an engine and there's nothing better than seeing the number go up and up. If you get the little fire thing too? Oh we COOKING now.

You can sweat and really try to calculate hands or you can just play purely off vibes and have fun throwing cards around.

The emerging gameplay elements are fantastic. The complexity and different decks slowly ramps up and you start creating more and more busted builds. When you're doing well it feels like you've broken the game and are doing something unique. That's a feeling many roguelikes try to create and Balatro nails it.

This is up there with Slay The Spire and Inscryption as far as deckbuilding roguelikes go. We have our holy trinity. It'll only get more amazing with future updates whenever they come.

It's also an A+ steam deck game. God forbid this ever drop on mobile. I may genuinely develop a problem at that point.

Anyway, gotta go play another round.

A very tight and focused language-based puzzle. Unlike the other linguistics-oriented games out there (Heaven's Gate, Chants of Sennaar), Epigraph presents you with a much more grounded scenario and places its language in a little bit of a wider (fictional) context to provide the player with tools for eventually deciphering it instead of presenting you with words in a vacuum and letting your character guess their meaning one by one. Due to the way the game is structured — namely, all the materials being available right from the start — Epigraph also doesn't need to fall back on the crutches of magically and definitively confirming when you've made a correct deduction, leaving a refreshing layer of ambiguity stretching over every piece of text. This approach is very fitting for an ancient lost language that you can kind of grasp but never truly master. Until the very end, you work off of what you yourself have established to be correct, and not what the game has told you is correct.

And this, in my view, is a very important distinction, since pretty much the entire game is based on making assumptions. You take the given information, extrapolate, then make a guess—no matter how informed—and see how well the results fit into a puzzle. With enough attention, most of the time you should be able to quickly get the feel for when the guess is entirely off-base or whether you're on the right track. So even without external validation, there are still breakthroughs to be had—both major and minor—serving as milestones and providing confidence that you are actually making progress and not just going around in circles.

The store page describes Epigraph as a short game, but I would argue it's only short in the same way a Rubik's cube is a 30-second puzzle. That may well be true if you're a savant or immediately click with the game, but for me, a former gifted child, it had a pretty decent runtime (around 9-10 hours), so I would absolutely say it's worth the already low asking price. Keep in mind that there is no grand mystery or stealth gameplay attached — all those hours are spent directly working with the language.

The presentation is neat and functional — the minimal interactive elements provide enough tools to keep track of your guesses and quickly try them out in different contexts, but not much more; so you are likely to need to bust out a notepad (or MSPaint if you're a real one for Mother Earth) at one point or another.

If this sounds interesting, and now you want to tinker around with an open-ended linguistic enigma, Epigraph is very easy to recommend. Join today, and you too may spend a few hours of your life walking back and forth mumbling to yourself about Makudovu and Pagomaru. Thanks Qwert :^).

we were fed slop for 17 years until nintendo finally released themselves from their NSMB shackles and delivered us the current 2d platformer of the decade so far

this game fixes just about every issue i had with the NSMB series including the very outdated legacy mechanics like a timer and arbitrary score count as well as smoothing out animations to make the series feel as fluid as ever. you never feel pressed for time while exploring a level to find that one flower coin you lost, and rarely are you ever locked out of finding a missing flower coin due to how open the levels are with their progression.

finding all of the flower coins, wonder seeds, secret exits, hidden levels, and even reaching the top of the flagpole on every level never felt tedious, which is equally surprising and impressive given how they managed to combine and balance the frustrating challenge of collecting all the star coins in the NSMB series with the equally INSANE completion requirement of reaching the top of the flagpole with all 5 playable characters in SMB3DW.

my only complaint is the game rarely, if ever, encourages you to vary in your badge usage. while i think having certain collectibles or level objectives locked behind certain badges would have made the game more tedious, i played through the entire beginning of the game using the parachute cap badge, then switching to the double jump spin badge for the rest of the game upon unlocking it.

nintendo has yet again crafted another perfect "first video game" for a new generation of fans and i'm sure this game is gonna be praised and remembered fondly for years to come.