Balatro And Hades Turn You Into A Video Game God
Roguelikes have the unique ability to make you incredibly overpowered for a short while, and that makes them magical experiences Menu
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By Stacey HenleyPublished Mar 1, 2024
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Related Balatro: 9 Beginner Tips Enough joking around in this indie card game.
Enough joking around in this indie card game.
You may think of roguelike bosses as the ultimate roadblock - you’re not just stopped in your tracks, the tracks are taken away from you and you’re forced to start all over again. But really, they’re just helping you line up a killshot. If you’ve got a bad build in another game, that’s a sunk cost. You can chip away at it until it becomes a good one, but it will take a while and a lot of struggling. Roguelikes force you to put them down to build something better.
I recently beat the initial run of Balatro, which got me thinking of this. Balatro is a deck-building, playing card based, poker roguelike, except it’s also none of those things (I already explained what this means earlier in the week). The aim of the game is not to be good at poker, which I understood from the off but couldn’t quite put into practise until right away. Because it lets you boost certain cards or hands, it may end up that a Pair is better than a Royal Flush - that’s exactly what happened, and exactly how I beat it.
The first Joker I bought gave me a one in five chance of boosting the value of the hand type I just played, which meant the more I played a certain hand, the better it got. Combine that with another Joker that also boosted the value of a Pair every time I played a Pair, and I was set. The fact the game counts Two Pair, Three of a Kind, Four of a Kind, and Full House as ‘playing a Pair’ meant all I needed was a couple of match ups per round and I could take the house.
That alone would have been enough to win, but in a supreme blend of clever strategy and blind luck, the Joker that boosted Face Cards that I’d held most of my run despite its minimal returns exploded in value when another Joker that made all cards act like Face Cards made the whole thing a cakewalk.
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Related 8 Games To Play If You Like Balatro If you enjoy playing Balatro, you’ll love these games too.
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These feel like one in a million odds, to have two pairs of Jokers combine so supremely out of 150 options. Given it was my seventh ever run of Balatro, my maths is probably out, but that doesn’t matter when it feels so good. I knew I had lucked onto something special, and while it still needed some work from me - holding and selling the right Jokers, playing Celestials, knowing which strategies to hit, boosting worse hands when I could - it felt as though the game suddenly gave me a grenade launcher when I’d been playing with a water pistol.
I was eventually undone by The Needle, the boss that lets you play one solitary hand to defeat it. I don’t mind the bad luck because without it you can’t feel the good.
Because it’s a roguelike, Balatro can afford to let you be this lucky, because sooner or later, the run will end and you’ll be back at zero. Linear games need constant checks and balances against you becoming overpowered lest the game lose its challenge and get boring. Roguelikes can let you luck your way to untold riches because in 15 minutes you’ll be penniless again.
I can still remember my first successful run of Hades for this very same reason. The whole time playing across 40 hours I never really settled on my favourite weapon, because I was always chasing the high of this run. One boon allowed me to throw explosive grenades, another two massively increased the surface area of the explosions, and a further one made enemies damaged by explosions explode on death. Just one grenade in Hades’ tight rooms and whole swarms exploded politely for me in sequence.
If the whole game had played like that, it would have been too easy and too dull. But after getting closer and closer, yet failing and failing, the immense power of a killswitch felt magnificent, especially because I knew I needed to use it while it lasted. The lack of permanence to anything but your own death can make roguelikes frustrating (I never could vibe with Returnal), but it allows the game to give you ungodly powers, safe in the knowledge it can take it away again. Whether it’s grenades on grenades on grenades on grenades, or just a really valuable two 8s and two Jacks, roguelikes are capable of magic other games can only dream of.
Balatro Balatro takes the classic card game of poker and adds roguelike gameplay, using Joker cards with various abilities to build your deck and attempt to defeat pesky blinds.
Platform(s)PS5 , PS4 , Xbox Series X|S , Xbox One , Nintendo Switch , PCReleased February 20, 2024 Developer(s) LocalThunk Balatro takes the classic card game of poker and adds roguelike gameplay, using Joker cards with various abilities to build your deck and attempt to defeat pesky blinds.
Platform(s)PS5 , PS4 , Xbox Series X|S , Xbox One , Nintendo Switch , PCReleased February 20, 2024 Developer(s) LocalThunk
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