Episode 196 - You Mentioned Pants - Balatro

I’m literally a podcast, what’s your excuse? Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Balatro, the hit poker roguelike from last year. Balatro is, in my opinion, the best kind of roguelike, with very synergy focused modifiers in the form of Jokers and card enhancements, as well as very permissive deck building options. You can, with proper management, cut large swathes of cards from your deck and really enable playing specific hands that synergize with the jokers you’re offered, meaning you can really set concrete goals for each run depending on what you are given early, so that strategic element is always at the forefront. A lot of this can be a little difficult to understand from the start though, and bouncing off is a real danger. To help ease that, the game has a really novel video-poker style aesthetic, with screen shaking effects and a dynamic, though single-track, score, which help draw you in and keep you invested. In the end, it’s a deep system that is still accessible and gives the player a lot of control over their runs, which does an especially great job of making higher difficulties feel challenging but not unfair. We’re going to be talking about joker designs from both a visual and mechanical standpoint, how strategies can differ depending on your goals in any given run, and how great twenty dollars actually is. Thank you for listening this week! This was a necessary episode to put a period on the addiction this game caused in me over the last year, but even so I definitely recommend giving this a try if you haven’t already. Did you get sucked into this game at all since it came out and generated a lot of hype? Is it really worth the time to go for Completionist++? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Astrobot, so I hope you’ll join us for that!