Let’s talk more about Balatro (LocalThunk) and indie games in general. Yesterday, I did A Quick Look at the game, and I have more to asy about it. It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t played it because you simply cannot capture the addictive nature of it in words. As I mentioned yesterday, just describing it to someone doesn’t tell yout the magic of the game.
“It’s a poker game that has qualifiers every run. It’s procedurally generated so you never know what condition you’re going to play under. Oh, and there are a ton of different kinds of cards.”
Before I get into that, I just played a bit more and won my first run. And then found out from the Balatro channel in the RKG Discord that you can order your jokers and your cards that you are playing. How? Well, ok.
*SPOILERS*
Here’s the thing. For every ‘boss’ hand (which is every third hand), there is some kind of negative effect. I mentioned this yesterday. Whether it’sa debuff of one suit of cards or you only get one hand or a dozen other debuffs, it’s always a stress. You can’t skip these hands, either, as you can the small blind and/or the big blind.
You get five jokers for each run. In this run, I just jacked up my multipliers. One joker had a 50 multiplier, which was tremendous. And, before the second-to-last-hand, I picked up the joker that will allow you to win a hand as long as you get a quarter amount of the chips (points) you needed by the end of the game. In this case, 100,000. So I only had to get 25,000.
But the last boss was called the Amber Acorn, and it shuffled and flipped over your jokers. I did not know what that meant exactly, and I was panicking at the idea of losing all my great multipliers and the joker that would allow me to win with a quarter of the points. I posted about it in the channel, and someone helpfully pointed out that you could order your jokers to maximize the multipliers. The game did it from left to right, so you wanted any + multiplier before a x multiplier. It made sense once I heard it, but it juest never occurred to me. I joked in the channel that I wasn’t sure I could handle even more thinking in this game.
Ian said that it was obvious once you tried the game how smart it was. He’s right. You may not be able to tell the depths right away, but it’s all right there. It’s deceptively simple, too. Play poker, amass chips (points), use a bunch of different cards, and then win. Or lose. Lots of losing. Oh, by the way, I won legit. I got over 100,000 chips so I didn’t even need that specific joker–but I was glad to have it, anyway. I should have known that they would not make it so you lost all your jokers–that’s too brutal. But there is one condition that you have to win the boss round with one hand–that would be so so hard (Ed note: Not a final boss, thankfully).
One person in the Discord said that he did not like the game because he was expecting there would be permanent upgrades between runs, but no. It’s a true roguelike in that you have to start over from the very beginning each time. There are different decks that you can start with (so like different characters) with different perks. The one I won with was the blue deck which gives you +1 hand every round. The red deck gives you +1 discard (I think). The yellow deck gives you +$10 in the beginning. As you win with different decks, you get different colored stakes (there are diffeernt ones unlocked for each deck)–and they make the game more dififcult, obviously.
This game is so refreshing in that it’s very clear in what it’s trying to do, and it’s pretty simple in its goal. There are eight rounds of three, and you can skip the small blind and/or the big blind in each round. You cannot skip the boss blind. After beating each boss, the ante and blinds are upped.
If I described everything, it would seem like a lot and be pretty overwhelming. But at the same time, I was like, “Is that all there is to it?” whenever I heard/read anyone talking about it. It really is something you have to play to get.
I know I’m still at the very beginning of the game (having won a run), and I totally get why people are addicted to it. There are a ton of cards–oh, and that’s how you level up the different hands–with the planetary cards.
There are so many cards, and I know you can unlock new ones. If I had one tiny complaint, it’s that there are so many cards. It’s a bit overwhelming, and I feel like I have to buy the ones I haven’t bought before for completion’s sake. But there are some that are so good that I just don’t wnat to give them up.
I know that I’m sttill in the very beginning of the game. I have read a bit of the forums, and it’s like people are speaking a different language. I still don’t know how much more I’m going to play because I’m not sure that I want to think that deeply about it. I will admit that I was surprised when I kept doing well on this run, even though I had two jokers that gave me such good multipliers.
It’s weird to think that I have but scratched the surface of this game. That’s another signal of a roguelike–the first win is merely the start. It reminds me of
Note: No idea why this isn’t finished or why it did not post on time. I’m leaving it here because I am starting another post and do not want to fall behind.