Balatro Review: "The Next Great Deckbuilder Roguelite"

screenrant.com:

The next great deckbuilder roguelite doesn’t boast pretty hand-painted fantasy art or an epic story, just pixelated chips, cards, and threes-of-a-kind. Solo developer LocalThunk’s debut is, simply and on its face, an upgraded riff on video poker, but recontextualizes the familiar betting game as a roguelite scoring puzzle. Vulnerable to broken builds which produce compulsively satisfying feedback heretofore unknown to digital cards, is a spellbinding, time-engulfing abyss. It’s also one of the most accessibly elegant deckbuilders since first laid claims to the genre, and what it lacks in fluffy set design it more than makes up for in raw, mesmeric gameplay.

is by no means the first video game poker mutation of its kind, with last year’s only the most recent roguelite to incorporate these basics into more complicated deckbuilder setups. There was also, a smartphone game series mixing standard poker hands with a bingo board play space. Both of these games and many others begin with the basic architecture of poker, but expand on it with fantasy creatures, narrative elements, and special abilities to spice up the standard expectations.

And then there’s the humble, unassuming. No narrative, no dragon boss fights, no talkative NPCs or lore-rich flavor text. begins and ends with just poker and math, with the essential amusement of seeing those big numbers become ever-bigger, framing its high scores with pleasant noises and colors to achieve maximal lizard-brain stimulation.

In, players compete against three blinds in sequence for a score in chips each round: a small blind, a big blind, and a boss blind. The latter always presents a special, randomly selected challenge quirk, like achieving the blind minimum while sabotaging cards played in the previous round's matches, or preventing cards with certain suits from scoring at all. Succeeding against any blind typically results in a cash reward, which can then be spent at a randomized shop in between matches, or strategically