Balatro is an amazing roguelike game. I personally never enjoyed poker, but fell in love with Balatro, so if you're in a similar boat put the poker elements aside and think of it as a deck-building game. You have a 52 card deck which can be shaped in a variety of ways. There are 150 joker cards with unique effects that impact your run, planet cards which increase the power of poker hands, and arcane cards which typically allow you to enhance, alter, or remove cards from your deck. There are eight antes, or levels, in a Balatro run; your goal is to complete ante eight. Each ante has three different rounds, the first two can be skipped to recieve a benefit– however you'll miss out on the cash and item shop you would've earned from playing the round– the last one is a boss round where a specific modifier is applied to you (heart cards debuffed, face cards drawn face down, only one hand type, etc). After each round you get access to an item shop where you can purchase jokers, or cards which will improve your deck - you also gain interest on money held between rounds in-case nothing in the shop catches your eye. These elements all work together well to create a fun experience where every decision matters, that is unique each run, and always winnable (on lower difficulties) once you get the hang of it.

One of my favorite things about Balatro is how much variety there is. With 150 jokers and 15 deck choices, there are many different strategies you can build into while finding success. As an example, I recently won only playing clubs, only playing two pair, playing high card, and playing only face cards. In terms of criticisms for Balatro, while it is really well balanced around lower difficulties, once you're at the highest difficulty levels that doesn't hold true. IMO this is something that's way harder to balance in a deckbuilder, but in other popular amazing roguelikes, Hades, and The Binding of Isaac you could throw a really high skill player into some of the highest difficulty settings/challenges available, and their skill could carry them to victory, and over a 50% win rate. In Balatro on the other hand, you can play absolutely perfectly, and never see anything good in the shop before the round scale to a point where you're going to lose. I don't claim to be an amazing Balatro player, but I can guarantee you that even the best Balatro player in the world, or a bot doing everything perfectly, is going to have a very low win rate with the black deck on gold stakes. Another small point of criticism/feedback is joker balance; while most have amazing use cases, there are a few that feel worthless (moreso than ones that feel OP or super strong).

Another massive win for Balatro is that the solo developer, LocalThunk, is clearly very passionate, talented, and receptive to feedback from the community. Since I've been playing there have been multiple patches balancing jokers, difficulty levels, card modifications, etc. even though I do have a few criticisms for Balatro, they don't make me think negatively about the game in any way because I know LocalThunk is listening to the community, and is going to continue doing an amazing job with the game (the only thing I dislike about LocalThunk is that he created that Completionist++ achievement). Balatro is a game I was skeptical to pick up because of my dislike for poker, but now I have 200+ hours in the game, have completed all 20 challenges, and beat the hardest difficulty on 11/15 decks; clearly, I am very high on the game. Balatro is also an amazing entry point for the roguelike genre. It's a game that is so unique, adapting many of the genre's best elements to a classic game in impressive fashion, on top of that it's incredibly polished and charming; Balatro is a game anyone can enjoy, and it's an instant entry into the pantheon of all-time amazing roguelike games.

Necessary Play

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