It’s that time of the year when I give out weird and quirky awards to games that moved me in one way or another. This year, there were several games I played that I was really divided over how I felt about them. Several of the games I will be noting this year are very jagged in how I feel about them.
That said, in this post I want to mention my non-From game of the year from last year, Balatro (Local Thunk). Why? because most of my play time of it was from this year. When I bestowed it my non-From game of the year last year, I had just started playing the game. I did not know how deep it went, really, or how deep into it I would get. I wrote several more posts after that, and I played tons of hours more as well. I nearly got the plat, but the last two achievements are ridiculous.
One of my defining gaming moments of the year came from this game. It was doing all the challenges, which turned out to be such a pain in the ass. When I first tried them, I was fairly early on in my Balatro career, and I failed to do a single one. Each one has a gimmick to it, and when I tried them again, I was much later on and more savvy as to how to actually play the game. I started doing them one after the other, and I knocked most of them down pretty effortlessly.
Until I came to the end. There were two that made me raise my eyebrows. One was Golden Needle in which you only had one hand per round. I had trouble doing that with the boss The Needle (one hand), so doing it for every hand in a whole run? It seemed impossible.
And it nearly was. But I did it, and I was pretty proud of myself for getting through it. There was a guy in the Balatro channel of the Discord I’m in who started doing the challenges later than I did, but quickly caught up by the time I reached the last few. (There are twenty of them.) The last one, Jokerless, nearly made me lose my mind. The name of it pretty much tells you what the challenge is–beating a run with no jokers.
I tried it using my usually pair/high card strat and did not even come close. I had to look up strats for it, plus the other guy and I discussed it as he reached it, too. He was a straights guy, using it as his usual strat. I don’t do anything straight, but I was desperate enough to try. He gave me some tips, and I continued to chip away at it, pun intended.
It was awful. That’s when all the joy of the game was drained for me. I should have just stopped and put it behind me, but I could not do that. Plus the guy in the Discord and I were egging each other on, and I did not want to let him down. There was something cool about bonding with him over failing this challenge over and over again.
One way to beat this challenge was to do math. I was not going to do that so I had to make sure that I beat each hand by a comfortable margin. I watched a video on how to beat this challenge, and the biggest takeaway was to keep my straights open-ended on both sides (insert mildly risque sex joke here), even if I had the ace in hand. Oh, and of course the straight had to be 10-A for maximum chips. I pruned the deck like I had never pruned before–something I never did.