Review: Balatro is gaming’s best time thief since Vampire Survivors

The worst thing about Balatro is that it’s so good that we have to take time away from Balatro to write this review.

It’s an experience that, on the face of it, seems utterly simple and mechanically repetitive, but then suddenly, you’ve been playing it for a week. You’re thousands of hands in. Your friends are begging you to go to sleep because it’s 4 in the morning.

One. More. Hand.

Balatro is a deck-building roguelike built on the very basics of Poker. You’re given cards and you have to play those hands to earn points. Better hands earn more points. You can discard cards, but you only have a set number of hands to play each round.

The goal is to score more than the Blind, which is the score for that level. Every three levels, you face a boss who will have a special stipulation. These range from tough to deal with, like all scores being halved or certain multipliers not applying, to fairly simple ones, like one of the four card suits being banned.

What makes every run unique are the Jokers. These cards offer benefits to your run, and each has a series of ranks, which increase their effectiveness.

For example, one Joker may do something as common as give you an extra multiplier for every heart card you play, but as you play more of Balatro, the more complex cards start to appear, as does the game’s magic.

During your first few runs, you’ll wonder how it’s even possible to “beat,” the game. Eventually, the binds get so large that it doesn’t seem possible for a combination of cards to earn you that kind of score.

Then you’ll have a run in which everything falls into place. We had a run wherein we found a Joker that gave us a multiplier for every face card. We then found another Joker that counted every card in the deck as a face card, regardless of suit.

Later, we purchased a pack of Tarot cards (consumable cards that can change the properties of your deck) from the shop, which is visited between rounds, which offered us the chance to turn every card if offered into one of the