Review: Balatro is gaming’s best time thief since Vampire Survivors

The worst thing about Balatro is that it’s so good that we have to take time away from Balatro to write this review.

It’s an experience that, on the face of it, seems utterly simple and mechanically repetitive, but then suddenly, you’ve been playing it for a week. You’re thousands of hands in. Your friends are begging you to go to sleep because it’s 4 in the morning.

One. More. Hand.

Balatro is a deck-building roguelike built on the very basics of Poker. You’re given cards and you have to play those hands to earn points. Better hands earn more points. You can discard cards, but you only have a set number of hands to play each round.

The goal is to score more than the Blind, which is the score for that level. Every three levels, you face a boss who will have a special stipulation. These range from tough to deal with, like all scores being halved or certain multipliers not applying, to fairly simple ones, like one of the four card suits being banned.

What makes every run unique are the Jokers. These cards offer benefits to your run, and each has a series of ranks, which increase their effectiveness.

For example, one Joker may do something as common as give you an extra multiplier for every heart card you play, but as you play more of Balatro, the more complex cards start to appear, as does the game’s magic.

During your first few runs, you’ll wonder how it’s even possible to “beat,” the game. Eventually, the binds get so large that it doesn’t seem possible for a combination of cards to earn you that kind of score.

Then you’ll have a run in which everything falls into place. We had a run wherein we found a Joker that gave us a multiplier for every face card. We then found another Joker that counted every card in the deck as a face card, regardless of suit.

Later, we purchased a pack of Tarot cards (consumable cards that can change the properties of your deck) from the shop, which is visited between rounds, which offered us the chance to turn every card if offered into one of the four suits. Suddenly, we were playing hands that were all face cards of the same suit, and our scores began exploding.

That’s when Balatro made sense. It’s a puzzle game more than anything. You’re working out how to engineer the correct 5 Joker cards that will lead you to victory.

The only knock against Balatro is that occasionally, you’ll come across a Boss Blind with a modifier that is far too difficult for the level of Deck / Jokers you’d have been able to build up at that point. We’re specifically referencing the Boss Blinds wherein the required score will jump from something like 5,000 to 40,000.

“That’s when Balatro made sense. It’s a puzzle game more than anything. You’re working out how to engineer the correct 5 Joker cards that will lead you to victory.”

However, even having said that, it feels like there may have been a very obscure build that we missed or a card that didn’t fall at the perfect time, which would make even the impossible challenges seem feasible. It’s a game that’s never unfair. It’s always the player making the mistake. Balatro gives you all the tools.

Another crucial element of Balatro’s quality is how digestible runs feel. You can “beat” the game in 20 minutes if you get the right cards. You can pause a run at any time if you have the strength to take your eyes off of it. When the game eventually comes to phones, there’s going to be an epidemic of people missing their bus stops not seen since Tetris on the original Game Boy.

So what is it about Balatro that makes it so impossible to put down? It’s a confluence of unimpeachable mechanics and comical randomness. The rules of Balatro don’t change. You know the rules. You’re going to play the same hands thousands of times, but still no two games are the same.

The number of Jokers, and the random nature of the store, all of these things contribute to the feeling that this next run is going to be the win. You’ll remember a few Jokers from a past run and think how amazing the stacked abilities would be on this run. So you play again. And again.

Then suddenly, your Steam Deck or Switch will run out of battery and you’ll see your slack-jawed sweaty face staring back at you.