this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Maybe that's why I enjoyed it, but wasn't blown away by it.
I'm not interested in gambling, the closest I get is studying systems for beating the house. So when I see Balatro, I don't see anything related to gambling, because there are no stakes and only strategies for beating the various bosses, and the poker theme is just flavor.
But yeah, I could totally see it doing well as F2P game, I just would be completely uninterested. That's why I was so surprised by the original PEGI rating, because it's so out of line with my experience playing it.
I think you and I are probably similar in that. I'd say I really enjoyed about 20 hours of it, then played an additional 30 hours where I was hoping things would start getting fun again, but it never came.
Ignoring the video Slots scoring, and poker themes. I would still say luck is so much stronger in balatro then on any roguelike I've played. To the extent that the best "strategy", is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don't show up before the ante outpaces you.
In short, psudo-gambling mechanics are IMO largely what hooks people in the game, which I also have to say the PEGI group may actually be if anything slightly underestimating the risk. IE the game is 100% not gambling, but it draws on everything in the brain that gambling does. "Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further". I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there's a reason why there's such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics.
Balatro IMO leans into all of the hook on gambling tropes, just avoiding the last step of exploiting it to get users to continue to pay them money. It's actually a pretty reasonable question to ask... does it put kids/teenagers into a mindset that will make them more vulnerable to a less ethical game developer that takes that last step.
Yeah, I feel this. Slay the Spire ability to choose paths gives you some control over fixing some bad RNG, so Balatro feels more luck-based.
That said, it doesn't really feel like a "gambling" game. Gambling games have essentially no skill, whereas Balatro does have a lot of player choice, where the "best" choice isn't obvious (i.e. can't just follow a system). Gambling, however, usually has minimal player interaction, or there's optimal play that cuts the gap between the house and the player the most (but never more than 50%). It's basically like other deck building games, just with a poker theme and a bit more RNG.
Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, I called out someone who was trying to defend Balatro's RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that only 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty.
I don't know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game.
That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance... at absolute best you could only have an 80% win rate on the hardest difficulty.
I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd.
The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button... this is so beyond the realm of "just git gud scrub".
Yeah, I would say "playing 100% optimally is at least fair to look at, but if by known RNG, you can know things like say what joker will be negative if you take the skip blind, or what what will show up if you reroll the shop or open a pack, then that's such a huge advantage it doesn't even deserve to be part of the comparison. IE making zero mistakes would be a fair comparison... IE if you always take the move that has the highest odds of success with the information a player has, but counting decisions based on avoiding something with a 99% chance of success because the player knows it will be in the 1% is crazy bad way to grade something.