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Balatro Discussion (Nintendo Switch) [game]
 
Balatro on the Switch
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04/12/24, 20:02  
 
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I played a bunch of the latest indie sensation last night. It's a roguelike deck-builder on the surface, but the secret is that, much like Vampire Survivors, this is a clicker game in disguise. Your only goal is to make the number go up as fast as possible. Building the rube goldberg machine that makes this happen isn't completely uninteresting, but the number of manual actions that you need to take which don't correspond to meaningful decisions but do have exponentially large numerical results makes me really suspicious of the entire premise.

The possibility space here is small enough that writing a bot to play Balatro would be more fun than playing Balatro. Between this realization and the one I had a couple weeks ago—that life is too short to play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth—I find myself wanting to investigate Final Fantasy XII's battle-automating gambit system more than ever.
04/12/24, 20:03   
I decided to pick this up and try it out, since it is cheap and felt like it could scratch that Dicey Dungeons itch. It's interesting, but it feels like you're just trying to get enough multipliers / power-ups to make up for the fact that Poker is a super random game at the end of the day. And yeah, randomness is part of roguelikes, but in turn-based roguelikes with only a handful (no pun intended) of possible ways to get points, the randomness can really F you.

I think another thing that makes it not as interesting as Dicey Dungeons to me is that every round essentially feels the same. There are a few "boss" rounds with unique rules to them, but for the most part it's just look at your cards, decide if you're going for matches or a straight, and then discard some cards and hope for the rest. Nothing really changes much hand to hand, round to round.

Still, as S_T says it is interesting to build the machine. And it feels nice when you do get that perfect hand for the machine that you have built and you watch those multipliers adding up.
09/02/24, 03:25   
Edited: 09/02/24, 03:35
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