Still playing but got my first win so I'm ready to review. I think deck building rougelites are a cool idea but I've always been absolutely terrible at them. Something about the concept just doesn't click in my head. Balatro managed to break this for me. Something about how straightforward and ingrained poker hands are to me makes the idea of manipulating them make a ton of sense. The visuals are really simple but they're so polished and the visual flair of watching multipliers pile up feels amazing. Balatro surprised me with how much it hooked me.

I will say, one minor complaint is that it feels like it has that Binding of Isaac problem where you know whether your run is dead within about your first 5 minutes playing and it's easy to get into a pattern of having to restart over and over until the rng gives you something actually useful.