Balatro Review

ign.com:

There are some games that keep you entertained for a weekend. Some keep you busy for an hour on a weeknight after failing to settle on what new Netflix documentary to watch next. But then, every so often, a game like Balatro turns up and takes hold of your entire life – to the point where you open up your wardrobe and the only four suits your eyes can make out are clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts. This poker-influenced roguelike may appear straightforward at first, but take the risk of picking it up, and its ludicrously fun gameplay loop won’t let you put it down.

Never has the power of placing down a simple pair of kings garnered more delight than in Balatro, where it can suddenly conjure up an 82 x 146 multiplier as you watch the resulting equation satisfyingly solve itself in front of you. A deck-building roguelike quite like no other, it sacrifices the combat that has made so many in the genre such as Slay the Spire popular, and doesn’t even attempt a story that the likes of Hades told so well. Instead, Balatro relies solely on the power of playing cards to keep you engaged, and it does so with aplomb, gripping my attention tight with its relatively simple but effective toolset.

Tasked with hitting increasingly higher scores set by a small blind, big blind, and boss in each of the eight “antes” that make up a run, it's your job to engineer poker hands by discarding cards and hoping you draw the ones you need. Play these hands before running out of your limited attempts to build a high enough score and you’ll move on to the next challenge, with the ability to improve or modify your deck between encounters. Masquerading itself as a poker simulation, Balatro begs to be experimented with to the point of breaking, setting out its rules just as quickly as it encourages them to be broken.

That experimentation requires you to grasp only the very basics of poker (you need to know next to nothing in reality) before manipulating your deck to let you score your preferred