A full house.
Games like Balatro don’t come around very often. It’s the sort of experience that quickly burrows its way into your mind until you can think of little else, so you tell your friends about it, and then they tell their friends about it. Eventually, through the sheer power of word of mouth, a game that has seemingly popped up from nowhere is now one of the clear frontrunners for Game of the Year. We’re not even exaggerating, by the way; it really is that good. It’s destined to sit alongside the likes of Stardew Valley, Celeste, and Undertale as one of, if not the defining example of its respective genre, and frankly, we’re kicking ourselves that we didn’t catch wind of it sooner.
If words like ‘roguelike’ and ‘deckbuilder’ fill you with dread, we understand, but just bear with us on this. Balatro is a roguelike deckbuilder that’s built around the general concept of poker. The idea is that you need to utilise classic poker hands to build up your chips and beat the target score for each round (or, officially, ‘blind’). It sounds simple, and it genuinely is — you don’t even need any prior knowledge of poker hands because a quick tap of the ‘–’ button will bring up a handy list of every possible combination — but the challenge comes when the target chip number starts increasing.
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