At this point most of my decks are up to purple stake. I imagine I'll be playing Balatro for a long, long time to eventually get them all up to gold and I'm not going to be surprised if this ends up being my most played game for 2024.
The visual aesthetics feel just perfect for a game which feels like a corruption of the classic idea of poker. The only this letting it down a bit in terms of the surface level experience is the music. The single track playing throughout is a great piece but the fact there is no other music pretty much guarantees you'll switch it off after a few hours of play.
I've enjoyed deck-building roguelikes in the past but none have clicked particularly well. Slay the Spire especially was fun but I never reached a point where I felt like successes were more skill than bruteforcing the RNG until I got a lucky run. While the RNG presence in Balatro is amped up significantly compared to other deckbuilders, the fact it's the pinnacle of what it's trying to do makes that feeling mostly melt away whilst you're actually playing a run. For the most part.
After tens of hours the RNG can start to grate a little, but it feels sort of intrinsic to its core identity, rather than any kind of flawed game design decision. While you will learn how to build amazing joker combos and craft ridiculous decks, at the end of the day almost every run has to be fed into the RNG machine which decides if you're going to win. You can build decks which almost exclusively mitigate the need for luck, but the majority of the time you're not going to be building a high card deck which produces 17e10 chips out of nowhere.
Balatro walks a knife edge where sometimes losing a high stake run feels like there was nothing you could do. As a result I often ended up manipulating what I could to give myself the best possible start, endlessly restarting runs to get a good enough first ante to maximise the chance of being fully ready for the late game.
In the end the core gameplay is so tight that, despite a lot of your success feeling a bit out of your hands, I always end up starting another run and getting the luck I need next time. Or in 5 or 6 more attempts.
The visual aesthetics feel just perfect for a game which feels like a corruption of the classic idea of poker. The only this letting it down a bit in terms of the surface level experience is the music. The single track playing throughout is a great piece but the fact there is no other music pretty much guarantees you'll switch it off after a few hours of play.
I've enjoyed deck-building roguelikes in the past but none have clicked particularly well. Slay the Spire especially was fun but I never reached a point where I felt like successes were more skill than bruteforcing the RNG until I got a lucky run. While the RNG presence in Balatro is amped up significantly compared to other deckbuilders, the fact it's the pinnacle of what it's trying to do makes that feeling mostly melt away whilst you're actually playing a run. For the most part.
After tens of hours the RNG can start to grate a little, but it feels sort of intrinsic to its core identity, rather than any kind of flawed game design decision. While you will learn how to build amazing joker combos and craft ridiculous decks, at the end of the day almost every run has to be fed into the RNG machine which decides if you're going to win. You can build decks which almost exclusively mitigate the need for luck, but the majority of the time you're not going to be building a high card deck which produces 17e10 chips out of nowhere.
Balatro walks a knife edge where sometimes losing a high stake run feels like there was nothing you could do. As a result I often ended up manipulating what I could to give myself the best possible start, endlessly restarting runs to get a good enough first ante to maximise the chance of being fully ready for the late game.
In the end the core gameplay is so tight that, despite a lot of your success feeling a bit out of your hands, I always end up starting another run and getting the luck I need next time. Or in 5 or 6 more attempts.
rylirk
5 days ago