Ryan S Rogers

It's always the games that don't sound like much on paper that end up drawing me in the most, and this "Video poker roguelike deckbuilder" is no exception.

These days, my game sessions rarely go more than a couple hours, but Balatro feels like it's compelling me to keep playing. That hasn't happened to me since maybe Slay The Spire.

It feels like a game that has boiled down both deck builders and rougelikes to their pure essences and then combined them both into something that really is more than the sum it's (already amazing) parts.

Developer Localthunk said something on twitter once to the effect of "I tried to keep every card description to 8 words or less". It sounds simple, but that may be one of the best design decisions he could have made. So many rougelikes get bogged down in their items, making them more and more complicated as they go in an effort to add interesting complexities. Unfortunately that approach often comes at the the price of comprehensibility.

Belatro takes the path of less individual systems to modify, but allowing all of those modifications to synergize. This results in a game that is theoretically easy to break, but in practice still requires some deep strategic thinking.

It's only February, but this is a heavy contender already for GOTY.