I Used To Think Permadeath Made A Roguelike But Balatro Shows Its Actually Combining Abilities
The best part of Balatro or Hades isn’t permadeath, its synergies between your abilities and boons. Menu
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By Andrew KingPublished 4 days ago Thread 1
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Manage Your List Follow FollowedFollow with NotificationsFollowUnfollowShareFacebookXLinkedInRedditFlipboardCopy linkEmailLink copied to clipboardSign in to your TheGamer account For me, it was mostly a genre that was defined by the negative – what it took away from you. Most games let you save your progress. Roguelikes don’t. Most games give you more than one life. Roguelikes don’t. Most games let you start over at the most recent checkpoint. Roguelikes don’t. Most games let you carry your gear forward with you. Roguelikes don’t. When I made those early forays into the genre after getting back into gaming in 2016, I mostly thought of roguelikes as “those games that are really hard.”
Related Balatro Is My Full Circle Moment With Card Games I used to hate playing tabletop games, but Balatro has me devoting hours to playing poker.
I used to hate playing tabletop games, but Balatro has me devoting hours to playing poker.
But the more I play roguelikes, the more I focus on the unique traits they bring to the table that other games don’t. This year’s excellent poker roguelike, Balatro, brings the genre’s special something into crystal clear focus.
Balatro softens the roguelike blow with its basic concept. In cards, you don’t expect progress to carry over. Your last rummy hand might have been great, but that means nothing for the current hand. You’re dealt a fresh hand each time, and that’s a fitting mindset to have going into a roguelike.
Building Synergies To Break Your Enemies
Balatro is all about creating synergies by picking up cards with helpful powers as you go. Say you’re starting a new run, and you pick up the Joker card that adds a score multiplier whenever a Heart card is played. When you open a Booster Pack, you could focus on grabbing Heart cards, bolstering your supply of cards that are eligible for the multiplier. You could also use a Tarot card to turn one of your Spades into a Heart, tilting the deck’s balance toward Hearts.
Maybe you also pick up the Joker cards that reward playing even and odd-numbered cards. Add in the Splash Joker card, which makes every card count toward your score even if it isn’t part of a hand, and you can rack up points for every Heart card you play, odd or even, even if you have nothing good to play it with. You’ve stirred up a tidal wave of points, simply by playing one card’s power off another’s.
Other games do this with weapons or abilities. Vampire Survivors’ key appeal is this kind of synergy. I always liked to start with Garlic, which establishes a baseline radius around your character, and then add ranged attacks while buffing up the Garlic to cover more surface area. Hades, similarly, invites players to figure out which gods’ boons pair well together, mixing and matching in the quest for a better build. My best runs in Supergiant’s 2020 action game were often the result of odd abilities coming together to maximize their joint slay.
This is what the genre does so well. Because no ability will carry on beyond this run, you’re free to build something completely broken. This is a freedom that only roguelikes facilitate. While I saw it as a negative at first, there’s unique potential in being able to design a game that only needs to work for one run at a time. It gives each run a once-in-a-lifetime excitement. You might never make this exact build again, so enjoy it while it lasts.
Balatro isn’t unique in this respect, but it is clarifying. We’re used to playing cards. We know how it works on the tabletop. So, when you start throwing in multipliers and Jokers with special powers and Tarot cards that let your boring two of spades evolve into something special, it’s way more noticeable than in a game like Hades, where power-ups feel like a natural part of the action-RPG scenery. By focusing on something as mundane as poker, Balatro helps reveal what makes roguelikes so special.
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