Last year, a card game from an otherwise unknown, one-man video game developer, LocalThunk, was released and made immense waves across the industry. “Balatro” is the winner of the Best Debut Indie Game, Best Indie Game and Best Mobile Game at the 2024 Game Awards ceremony. The game deserved all the accolades it received, as it takes a very unique spin on poker and pushes the game to its absolute limit, and then some.
I made the mistake of skipping out on the game until recently, after many recommendations from friends. After procuring a Nintendo Switch 2, I gave the game a download, which wasn’t hard to stomach at only $15 – especially not in hindsight, knowing how much I enjoy the game.
At its core, the game is the card classic poker, but it adds even more layers to it in surprising, if not overwhelming, ways. The game’s genre is called a rougelike/rougelite, which means the game focuses on replayability using information and items gathered from previous attempts to get further in later runs. The random nature of a shuffled card deck, while still maintaining specific hands from poker, allows for the randomness and strategy balance to be kept intact. The game perfectly fuses strategy and randomness in a way I have never seen pulled off before, where randomness becomes part of said strategy in a genius way.
Given that the game uses poker as a base for its gameplay, one may expect to need to be good at poker to be able to get into and excel at “Balatro." I personally disagree, as I was quite rusty at poker when I picked up the game.
Will Jenkins, a freshman studying film, has an opposing view. “Maybe not for this specific kind of game ... maybe watch some videos on it and see what you think about ('Balatro’),” Jenkins said.
I found it easy to relearn the basics of poker and remember all of the poker hand types from the menus included within the game itself. Growing accustomed to the basics of poker took very little time, nor did the new editions and changes made here.
Where the game differs from traditional poker is where it begins to get interesting. Playing better hands nets you more chips, and each round requires you to surpass a certain threshold amount of chips to proceed. What makes this system interesting is the shop element of the game, where you can purchase power-ups in the form of unique Joker, tarot and celestial card packs, which the game calls consumable cards.
These packs can make certain hands more powerful and increase or multiply chip amounts when played, leading to strategizing around certain consumable cards and specific hands. These cards can help in a lot of great ways, or make often silly alterations to the game, like outright destroying cards from the deck or changing suits.
The strategy element here allows for “Balatro” to take a unique game approach that is not often seen in games, which is how each player has an innately unique strategy that is their own. There is no particular best strategy, and everyone I know who plays the game goes for different styles of play entirely.
Josh Plumley, a freshman studying actuarial science, reaffirms that “You can take it to your own personal heights (and) make your own skill ceiling ... you’re not trying to match the skills of other players. You can set your own skill cap and then break it. Try ‘Balatro’ and you will like it."
As Josh alluded to, no two “Balatro” playthroughs are exactly alike, which makes discussing and comparing strategies with others so valuable and interesting. The most fun I have had playing the game is playing the game alongside others, trying different strategies and seeing theirs in their own runs. While the game does not support multiplayer against others as of now, playing together in this manner is a fun way to get better at the game and enjoy it even more.
In the future, I would love to see the release of a dedicated Switch 2 version to take advantage of the system’s higher resolution capabilities, as well as the mouse controls to bring this version in line with the computer version, along with some integration of a true multiplayer mode to test one’s skill against others.
The game’s planned 1.1 update was recently delayed from this month to sometime next year, which is set to include new jokers and other content across all platforms in the first content update in two years. While awaiting said additions, I could not recommend giving “Balatro” a try more, even for those who may need a refresh on traditional poker or feel they will be overwhelmed by all the fancy new additions.
For being an excellent new take on a classic with plenty of twists of its own and an enticing gameplay loop, “Balatro” earns a 10/10 rating.
Logan Bauer is a freshman studying film at Ohio University. Please note the opinions expressed in this column do not represent those of The Post. Want to talk to Logan about his column? Email him at lb324324@ohio.edu.
