ElvenBenzene Balatro Review

Balatro stuck with me a lot longer than many of the other roguelikes I have played, the formula is so incredibly basic, yet it just works. It's the Todd Howard of roguelikes. It's surprisingly strategically deep, and gives you many more tools to power through that limit the impact of RNG. These tools still require careful planning of course, but you don't get pigeonholed nearly as hard into your build as you would with many other games in the genre. The game does have a hard game over due to the points requirement scaling faster than the player can physically increase their multipliers, while reaching and winning Ante 8 is what qualifies as a "win", the game is hardcoded in a way where even a perfect run will end at or before Ante 14. I would prefer if the game could be truly endless, but a true endless run is not possible without mods unfortunately. I think one of the game's biggest strengths is actually it's mod community. Balatro, due to it being coded entirely in LuaScript, is incredibly modular, you yourself could likely create a Balatro mod in a matter of days with very little coding knowledge. It's a recommend for me, especially due to the modding potential.