Catalog entry: Balatro
Thoughts
Good lord, this game. The visuals. The music. The vibes. The absolutely frictionless experience that is gliding through a play session, and only stopping because you accidentally saw a clock out of the corner of your eye and realized two hours had melted away.
I need to be perfectly clear about several things:
- I do not like deck-building games
- I do not like poker
- I certainly shouldn't like a deck-building game based on poker
But this monstrosity just pulls it off somehow. I have a four-month-old at home, and my gaming habits have all but died since ~last fall, outside of quick pick-up-and-play games, especially anything that plays well on the Steam Deck. And Balatro manages to check all of these boxes and do so in a way that not only made me find time for gaming, it made me find time for ~12 hours of it over about four days. That's insane for me at this point in my life. The only other games that even come close to that kind of grasp on me are releases by the studio FromSoftware (of Dark Souls and Elden Ring reknown).1 Now, obviously, the genres of these sets of games couldn't be further apart, which brings me to my next point.
Balatro is sitting at ~95k Steam reviews at the time of this writing, 98% of which are positive. It was nominated for GOTY 2024. You don't need me to tell you that it's good in order to get that impression of the game, but that's not the point here. The point of this catalog entry is to encourage you to look into Balatro precisely because it is so wildly unlike me to dig a game in this genre, especially with this specific focus (poker). In short, even if you don't normally play games like Balatro, you seriously ought to consider picking this one up.
Games and genres I usually prefer (for reference)2
- Nearly everything From Software has released, including all three Dark Souls entries, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and all Armored Core entries that I've played so far, including all PS1 entries and II on the PS2
- Metroidvanias, including Hollow Knight, the Ori games, Blasphemous, and many entries of the genre's two namesakes
- A very specific smattering of very good roguelikes (none of which are similar to Balatro, mind you), including Star of Providence, Enter the Gungeon, The Binding of Isaac, and Hades
- A few 2D & 3D platformers, including Celeste, Shovel Knight, and plenty of classic Nintendo entries e.g. Banjo-Kazooie, most Mario games and most Donkey Kong games
- Literally every game Supergiant Games has put out, they have my full support and fervent advocacy (includes Bastion, Transistor, Pyre (and Hades, again))
- Most any modern RPG that Bethesda has released, because they're basically video game comfort food. This includes The Elder Scrolls III, IV, and V, Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4
- A very specific list of third-person games that can all be vaguely considered "action/adventure," including CONTROL, Horizon Zero Dawn, Metal Gear Solid III and IV, NieR: Automata, and The Witcher 3
- Several modern first-person games, with many leaning towards the "immersive sim" side of things. Includes Bioshock 1, 2, and Infinite, Dishonored, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 including Episodes 1 and 2, Half Life: Alyx, Halo 1-3, the Metro 2033 series, and Prey
Other games whose genres I don't usually prefer3
Like Balatro, these are examples of games that transcend their genres as I mentioned previously, because I don't like most other games that are similar to them:
- Cuphead
- Gorogoa
- Later Alligator
- Monster Hunter World
- Outer Wilds (not to be confused with The Outer Worlds!)
- Portal & Portal 2
- All entries into the "The Room" series
- A Short Hike
- Slime Rancher
- Star Fox 64
- Stardew Valley
- Subnautica
- To the Moon
- Undertale
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1...and, of course, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, and the Armored Core series, and the King's Field series. Studio full of hitters, that.
2my hope is to eventually get most of these built out as catalog entries in and of themselves, though perhaps with less waxing poetic (he said, lying).
3see point 2