Balatro

Despite that, Balatro is an incredibly easy-to-learn deck builder with plenty of room for experimentation. Even after hundreds of runs, you’ll still encounter new options and combinations to twist your brain around. Even if roguelites and deck builders aren’t normally your favorite genres, Balatro is a game you need to check out.

That's a downbeat ending for a review of something so striking and so brilliantly constructed, and something that has given me such pleasure for the last week. But in a way, I even find this to be part of Balatro's generosity. It's the realisation that something can be fundamentally beautiful, but also not quite for you. And that is fine. Anyway. I hope Balatro's for you, and I hope you have a brilliant time with it.

Balatro is a monument to math. It is proof positive that there are alchemists out there, people far smarter than you or I, capable of spinning math into gold. The game is exactly as serious as you want it to be, massively satisfying whether you casually play a solid deck for low stakes or crank the game straight to wumbo with a wonky deck that’ll require several failures in a row before taking off, getting by with razor-thin margins and sheer force of will.

Balatro from developer LocalThunk is a marvel of a poker experience. While its base-level design is poker, the game’s complicated layers of beautiful strategic ridiculousness driven by upgrades, buffs, and jokers make for a unique experience that is both stimulating and challenging.

Pleasant as its weirdly hypnotic music is, another track or two wouldn’t have hurt. But this is a nitpick so minor my fingers can barely bring themselves to type it, not when I could be using said fingers to take another crack at unlocking more cards. This is an absolute triumph, the reason Valve should rename their handheld ‘the Balatro machine’.

While the idea of a poker roguelike might sound like a niche game, the flair and fun found within Balatro makes it an absolute must-play for fans of the genre. Breaking the rules of poker to score millions of chips in a single hand was a rush, and I was always chasing ways to push it even further beyond. While there are a few times you can feel snubbed by the luck of the draw, these are wildly overshadowed by the moments where you hit it big.

Balatro is my new gaming obsession, I frigging love it. Deckbuilding roguelikes have had some phenomenal games over the years. Balatro reaches the lofty peak of Slay the Spire and has me hooked even harder than that incredible game ever did. You should buy it, now. Buylatro!

Balatro is an ingenious and entertaining roguelike and one of my favorite games of the year. Playing it has become a near-obsession; everything feels perfectly designed to encourage you to keep trying because that next run could be the run of your life. Even after hours of play, I still can’t overcome Balatro’s biggest challenge: putting it down.