Balatro

Balatro feels like a game that’s being made up on the spot. On the surface, it’s a roguelike deckbuilder about constructing poker hands, but it’s also about enhancing your abilities with tarot cards, limited editions, and increasingly esoteric jokers like credit cards and bus passes. It’s a remarkably pared-down experience; it’s just your cards, an EarthBound battle background, and a score target. Its aesthetic is pretty boring, if I’m being honest. But that allows Balatro to focus on what it does best: produce insane quantities of dopamine via the reliable method of watching numbers rapidly climb as a result of carefully-planned synergies and chain reactions.

Balatro is the distilled essence of its genre. “Addictive” is the first word used to describe any roguelike deckbuilder worth its salt, and that goes double here. The singular soundtrack pairs with the visuals and mathematical gameplay to hypnotizing effect, making it genuinely difficult to resist attempting another round or seven. And between the unlockable starting decks, difficulty modifiers, and challenge modes, there’s more than enough content to support the habit. However, being the quintessential deckbuilder means being especially vulnerable to the genre’s nemesis: random chance. Unlike the similarly-enormous consequence-free casino Vampire Survivors, there’s a surprising amount nuance and strategy to Balatro, all of which can immediately go out the window if the RNG is in a bad mood. Of course, if that’s a turn-off for you, you probably checked out at the first mention of cards anyway.