Hey Game Afternooners, It’s about time I talked about a game that has been on my mind lately. By “Lately” I mean 59 hours since September 17th. DON’T JUDGE ME. All I do is work, write these articles for you, and play Balatro. It ain’t much but it's a life 🙂. This game is truly a Masterpiece and if you like roguelikes or card games or both: PLAY IT.
INTRO:
You’ve played Poker before right? Well Balatro is a poker themed roguelike deck-building video game developed by LocalThunk and published by Playstack. It was originally released on February 20, 2024 for a myriad of systems and was received with OVERWHELMING success. In the game you play poker hands to ultimately score higher and higher points and attempt to defeat “blinds” which equate essentially to a specific number of points that you as the player need to score over in a certain number of hands.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Steve, a game about playing poker hands and just trying to score points seems a little barren BORING EVEN.” Well little Timmy I have great news for you: you couldn’t be more wrong. The game implements this scoring system in a way that is truly exciting and fun, every single hand you play is both exhilarating and suspenseful. This is the case because of the implementation of cards called Jokers which exist separate from your deck and give you specific effects to manipulate the number of points you’ll receive.
The game is wildly simple as it just uses the analog stick, A and B buttons for selecting and choosing cards or buttons to press. Let's dive into this game a little bit more and discover how LocalThunk engineered a game to make us think we were smarter than him.
THE MEAT:
Now let's bring the title of this article into the discussion of this game. Breaking games is something that players LOVE to do. Speedrunners do it regularly in their unending hunt to “get the best time”, other players simply find joy in knowing that they were able to find something that will ultimately improve the game for other players by reporting it to the developers to fix, and lastly some just find joy in hacking a game to be the best there is hiding under the map and blasting people that can't see them. While some of these reasons are more honorable than others, the point remains that we love breaking things as humans, it's in our nature(If you can prove to me that you never knocked down a Jenga tower as a child then I will take it back but I don’t think you can).
It only makes sense that as game developers and designers we take the things we know our players love and try to turn them into a mechanic of some sort and roguelikes have been doing that since their inception with games like Slay the Spire, and Risk of Rain leading the way as two of the top dogs in this category. Within Balatro there is a specific meaning that I'm going for when describing “breaking” the game, it is when a player gathers enough items, cards, or abilities synergizing with each other that they begin to have the thought “no way the designer could have thought of this combo its too strong”
Remember that I mentioned Jokers earlier? This is one way that we can break the game and rather than try to give you some overarching statement that encompasses all of these cards and what they do let me just read to you 4 of the 150 of them
Four Fingers Joker: All Flushes and Straights can be made with 4 cards
Pareidolia Joker: All cards are considered face cards
DNA Joker: If first hand of round has only 1 card, add a permanent copy to deck and draw it to hand
Trading Card Joker: If first discard of round has only 1 card, destroy it and earn $3
On top of that your 52 card deck that is standard to poker or other card games isn’t set in stone. As a player you can manage to find jokers and other cards from booster packs that you can purchase to manipulate your deck. Don’t like some cards in your deck? Remove them with a hangman card, love how the queen of hearts synergizes with your jokers? Use a card to create more of them. I once played a game where I had replaced every card in my deck to be all Jacks and could play 5 of a kind every hand no matter what. That is what I mean by broken.
I haven’t even mentioned tags, vouchers, or the three different types of booster packs which all change your deck, shop, or overall gameplay drastically. In the 59 hours I've put into this game it's never been even close to playing the same game twice, it's just that dynamic.
OUTRO:
So there you have it, Game Afternooners, Balatro is more than just a poker game—it's a symphony of strategy, chaos, and joy that dares you to break it in the best ways possible. Whether you're a fan of deck-building, roguelikes, or just love the thrill of outsmarting the game itself, this masterpiece is worth your time. Just know in the back of your head LocalThunk saw this coming and planned every bit of it.
Thank you for coming to my TED Paragraph and until next week It's Ya Boi Steve Michie.
