Balatro stole my year and I’d give it the next one too
One more run. It’s always one more run. Send help, or don’t, I’m busy building a flush-five deck.
I bought Balatro for the price of a sandwich and it has cost me roughly four hundred hours, two early mornings I will never admit to, and any moral high ground I had about mobile gacha games. It is a poker roguelike made by one anonymous developer, it looks like a CRT had a fever dream, and it is the most dangerous thing in my library.
The hook is a magic trick
You build a poker hand. Then you build a deck around that hand. Then you find a joker that multiplies the thing the deck does, and another that multiplies that, and somewhere in the third act of a run you stop playing poker entirely and start operating a small, beautiful score-printing machine. The number goes up. The number goes up. The number goes up by an amount that should not be legal, and your brain releases something it usually saves for actual achievements.
It has no business being this addictive, and the developer clearly knew that and shipped it anyway.
What keeps it from being a cheap dopamine slot machine is how much genuine decision-making hides under the flashing lights. Every joker is a fork. Every shop is a gamble between consistency and a build-defining swing. Losing never feels random; it feels like a sentence you wrote three rounds ago and only just finished reading.
The warnings on the box
- “One more run” is a lie you will tell yourself nightly.
- You will dream in poker hands. This is not a metaphor.
- You will explain flush-five builds to people who did not ask.
A 9, a sandwich’s worth of money, and the best terrible decision in my Steam library.
A roguelike that turns a card game into a slot machine you actually have to think about — ruinously good.
Plus
Endlessly deep build variety; perfect tactile feedback; preposterous value.
Minus
Genuinely compulsive; thin on long-term meta goals; will end your sleep schedule.
Comments (5)
calling it a “slot machine you have to think about” is the most accurate review sentence of the year. it’s genuinely a strategy game wearing a casino’s clothes.
single dev. price of a sandwich. cleaned up at every award show. there’s a lesson in there for studios spending 300 million on open worlds.
i have lost actual sleep and i’m reviewing this comment from inside a run i started “just to test something” at 11pm.
the “just to test something” run is how they get you. it’s never one test. see you at ante 12.
9 not 10 only because the meta-progression runs dry once you’ve unlocked everything. the runs are perfect, the long game is thin.
explained a flush five build to my partner who did not ask, at dinner, with cutlery. we’re fine. the game is the problem.