Balatro is a great example of why small games can be just as good as big ones. The developer of this game, LocalThunk (one individual), and the publisher is Playstack. The game was released on February 20, 2024 on all platforms besides macOS. The game is under the casual strategy genre. There is no multiplayer support and the game is still getting updates.
The actual game is very simple but with many factors that give it much more replayability. Each turn you are in you play a blind, which is just a score goal that lets you move to the next one. You are given four chances to beat the blind by making hands out of eight different cards out of the standard 52 card deck, if there are no good options for a hand you can use a discard, which you get 3 of every blind. Each different hand type (based on poker hands) gives a different amount of base points and multipliers, along with your cards giving points depending on the number of the card. Every third blind a boss blind appears that will give an additional restriction to how you play the hand.
Because the game gets increasingly more difficult with every blind there are many ways to keep up with the difficulty. After every blind you are sent to a shop where you can buy jokers, tarot cards, planet cards, spectral cards, and permanent buffs. Money is earned depending on how well you played each round. Jokers are cards that activate every turn or when specific conditions are met, jokers can increase your multiplier and points or can do more creative things like disabling a boss’ ability or even making more jokers. Planet cards will level up your hand types by making them give more multipliers and points. Tarot cards will typically modify your deck by adding, removing, or changing the cards there. Spectral cards will give major boosts with an equally major downside.
Special modifier cards can be on jokers and normal cards, they provide boosts for those individual cards. Jokers can have foil (+50 score), holographic (+10 multiplier), polychrome (x1.5 multiplier), and negative (+1 joker slot). Card modifiers include glass (x2 multiplier, 25% chance of being destroyed), stone (+50 score, no suit or number), lucky (too much to explain), mult (+4 multiplier), bonus (+30 score), wild (is any suit), steel (x1.5 multiplier if held in hand during a turn), and gold (+$3 if held till the end of a blind). Seals can go on basic cards too and include red (retriggers the card again), purple (gives one random tarot card when discarded), blue (creates the planet card for the final played poker hand of round), and gold (earn $3 when this card is played and scores).
This game seems extremely complicated but it really isn’t, you only have to worry about all of these special cards and modifiers when you have one. It is also important to note that I haven’t talked about any of the additional challenges, different decks, and tags. Since this game lets you go at your own pace and slowly introduces you to all the content, it’s getting a 4.5/5 and a definite recommendation from me. This game is a breath of fresh air from all the massively multiplayer shooters that convolute their games with microtransactions and skins. It is just truly amazing that this game exists at this time when you would expect it to get squashed by everything else.
