Balatro is a special kind of good
Balatro is a great game. Reviews, game of the year awards, and general sentiment seem to agree. The question I've been pondering is why. There's something special about the way the mechanics and small details of the game come together that make it so satisfying. This isn't a game that really has spoilers so I am going to go into details here.
The first sign you get that Balatro is great is in the onboarding. The game uses poker hands as a way to score points. Even if you've never played poker before, most of the hands you can play are easy enough to learn. You're also quickly introduced to the idea of jokers. Jokers provide small tweaks to the rules which can compound and combine in interesting ways. Your first joker is always a 'Score Multiplier +4' joker, which introduces the joker mechanic in an easy-to-understand way.
By the time you've completed your first blind, you're familiar with most of the mechanics of the game. You've seen chips, multipliers, hands, discards and now dollars and the store. There are a couple more mechanics like planet cards but they all modify the rules you now know in a predictable way. From here, you're basically on your own. This is where the fun starts.
You'll reach the end of whatever round you're playing. You may win, or perhaps miss out on hitting one of the blinds. In either case, the end of a game doesn't feel like a loss of investment. I think this is one of the big things that makes Balatro great. Realistically, you may lose a round based on decisions you made very early in the game but when you lose you often feel like the error just happened. This immediacy means that the bar to starting a new round is extremely low.
Outside of endless mode, this also applies to a win. There are eight stages with a maximum of three games in each, the time spent is capped and this regularly refreshes the gameplay. You start again with an empty state and the RNG deals out new combinations of jokers and setups that make each round interesting and new.
After a few rounds and discovering a handful of jokers, synergies start to appear. You'll find jokers that boost face cards and jokers that treat all cards as faces. Early cards set up ideas in your mind. Ideas that you can then double down on and build a game centred around the mechanic. The developers did a great job here creating enough jokers that synergise to exponentially grow the number of ways you can play. There's never a feeling that only some of the jokers gel well together, you can setup an interesting round with almost any combination.
A few more rounds pass, and you're now comfortable. You've finished rounds in a single hand and watched the fire effect on the chips and multiplier as your cards stack their effects. You've unlocked higher difficulties, new decks and more and more of the jokers, spectral cards and vouchers. At this point, the mechanic of exponential score increases takes over as the primary hook. If you've played incremental or clicker games before you know this can be a very addictive mechanic. In early games, hands might reach the low thousands of points. As you get more familiar with Balatro hands will begin to score millions, tens of millions and beyond.
Eventually, you'll feel like you've personally mastered the game. That might not be at 100% completion. You'll know the rules and the fun well enough to blast through a quick game and pick up where you left off. This opens up the last driver of what I think makes Balatro so good, watching other people's crazy games. There is a massive amount of YouTube and streaming content of people playing Balatro. That's true of a lot of popular games, but it works for Balatro in particular because many of these videos show off crazy combinations, and because you can become familiar with the rules so quickly, seeing someone combine jokers in a new way is easily understandable and keeps you hooked.
I don't want Balatro DLC, new mechanics, or a sequel. Balatro is just fine as it is today, and that, along with all of its other pieces, makes it a great game.
