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"it's slackers like him that give hell a bad name."
  • Balatro is sick in more ways than one.

I can’t write much at the moment – for the past couple of weeks, I’ve done nothing in my downtime except play Balatro. I was so close to getting my parents onto Balatro, too: App Store, finger two inches above the pricetag. In the end, however, Dad doesn’t have the time:

https://brologue.net/2023/11/07/tinker-tailor-painters-eye/

Mum, on the other hand, refuses to play any game that isn’t Candy Crush, because 1) she hates losing, and 2) (this is her words) “Candy Crush isn’t addictive.” Which is to say – it doesn’t interfere with her day-to-day life. She’s not denying any evidence to the contrary, that Candy Crush, like any video game, has feedback loops that keep you playing.

There was, however, one person I sucked into the Balatro Hole™: Razzle. He shouldn’t have gotten sucked in. I showed him Balatro, let him play a few runs, and in real time, I could see the signs of a good roguelike manifest: the gamer lean, the knee bounce, and rage queuing whenever he lost a run. Rage queuing – in a single-player game!

Balatro’s basic premise lends it an approachability that makes it easy to explain to anyone over 55, and or stuck in cubicle with little else to do. It’s solitaire. It’s poker. You make numbers go up like in games of yore. You get it, your mum gets it, her mum gets it, your boss especially gets it; BBC journalists now have another game to report on that isn’t Tetris.

(True, mainstream media isn’t where I go first for games journalism – but the FEMTOSECOND anything about Tetris comes out, there’s a story on the BBC website somewhere. A collection of 30+ year-old Argos catalogues and anything that released on the Micro constitutes its collective gaming memory. If you see any game featured that isn’t in these previous sets, you’re hallucinating.)

Balatro is like going back to 1998 and asking those same journalists, who were just starting to get to grips with the Internet, what “Y2K Solitaire” would look like. They’d look at me, all bemused, wondering what the fuck this Y2K thing has to do with a card game, and more importantly, what I know about the next twenty-five years that they don’t.

And instead of showing them how utterly wrong a certain Paul Krugman quote was1, I’d pull out my strange magic brick and show them this:

Why did the number go up so much? Y2K Solitaire. Why is that Joker a boot and why is it shiny? Y2K Solitaire. Is that second Joker a buttplug? Y2K Solitaire. Why Y2K Solitaire? You seriously can’t tell me that the background shader DOESN’T remind you of music visualisations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_visualization

Office workers of 1998, rejoice! History didn’t end. And then, get back to work. The boss doesn’t pay you to marvel at time passing; you’ve got a recession and authoritarianism and war and genocide to look forward to,.

Suffice it to say, I think Balatro is sick in more ways than one. I got it from a friend who gifted it to me on Steam, and then, after Razzle had so much fun, I gifted it to him. Winter bugs, be jealous. Game awards or no, don’t be surprised if you’re the next to catch it.

TTLY

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Yes, Balatro DOES Deserve GOTY is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

  1. “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” ↩︎