you may never really tell what the next possible surprise indie smash will be, can you? After receiving one poker-themed roguelike game last year in the form ofZoeti,which while fun, didn’t exactly set the gaming world ablaze, some of us didn’t expect another such game to be a hit. But some of us did notice that Playstack and developer LocalThunk’s deckbuilding game Balatro had potential, especially when its demo racked up over two hundred thousand downloads during the most recent Steam Next Fest earlier this month, which was an indicator of something promising. Still, we weren’t prepared for the level of success that Balatro would receive upon its release today for PC and consoles.
As seen in its launch trailer, which you can watch here,Balatro is a mix of poker and deckbuilding where the goal is to come up with winning poker hands in order to conquer various blinds, including tricky boss blinds. To do this, you’ll have to resort to the age-old method of cheating, taking advantage of a hundred and fifty unique Joker cards along with Tarot cards, Planet cards, Spectral cards, and more, in order to modify your hands with classic roguelike synergies and provide the edge needed. It’s the type of game that’s simple to learn, easy to play, hard to master, and even harder to put down, as evidenced byour own Jordan Helm giving the game a rare perfect score,even deeming it “…the new front-runner for what is easily the best gaming experience of 2024.”
More Than Just a Winning Hand
Beyond Hardcore Gamer, other perfect scores have come from Screen Rant and XboxEra, calling Balatro"an addictively delicious, menacing creation which devours hours without mercy"and saying that it"reaches the lofty peak of Slay the Spire and has me hooked even harder than that incredible game ever did,“respectively, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun has declared it to be one of its"Bestest Bests.“In addition to all that, the game has already gottenan “Overwhemlingly Positive” rating on Steamfrom its players. In fact, as of the time of writing here, Balatro is coming out as the best-reviewed game of 2024 so far, with a 94 on bothOpenCriticandMetacritic.
Granted, that title definitely comes with some asterisks right now, as it has only been one day since reviews have been up, and we’re less than a sixth of the way through the year, but a small indie game such as this managing to outscore such heavy hitters asLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealth,Tekken 8,andPrince of Persia: The Lost Crown,if only for a moment, is no small feat. Balatro is now available on all major platforms, so there’s no excuse to not try out what might already be one of this year’s Game of the Year candidates.
Review: Balatro
Simple to get into, hard to put down, Balatro’s endless possibilities result in one of the best and most rewarding takes on deck-building yet.
