So, 2024 is nearly done. This has been a pretty good year for me overall. I’ve deepened my faith and broadened my interests (especially in reading), and I’ve come a long way since I started the year. How I feel now compared to how I felt around the same time in 2023 does feel like night and day, and I couldn’t be more grateful to the Lord and those around me. Honestly, I am very thankful.

In a strange twist, I didn’t play many video games this year. Part of that is due to me simply choosing to do other things, but a lot of it was because many of the new games that came out this year didn’t grab my attention. This was not a strong year for gaming in many ways, and many would agree with me when I say this. Don’t get me wrong, though; there were some good ones! Astro Bot (which won Game of the Year), Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth are all excellent titles I would recommend. That said, this isn’t a post about any of those games. Instead, it’s about Balatro. Let’s talk about it.

To give a brief summary, Balatro is a roguelike deck-building game made by a Canadian developer who calls himself LocalThunk online. It’s themed around poker, and while there is no actual gambling involved in the game, it will teach you some of the fundamentals of poker, mainly the several different hands that can be played in a game of actual poker. The game’s main objective is to play hands that score a lot of points, defeat enemies (Blinds) and precise levels (Antes), and make your deck of cards stronger and stronger until you reach the eighth ante and defeat the final boss blind. After you clear the eighth ante, you can then continue in an endless mode until you die, which is eventually a given because of how ludicrous the point thresholds become. You can play with multiple decks, some of which provide you fewer turns (Hands) and others that completely trivialize the game until you hit higher stakes, which are difficulty settings you can unlock for each deck after beating a run with said deck. There are also special cards you can acquire called Jokers, which give you special powers to beat Blinds more easily. I won’t waste time going into how they all work because that would take forever.

The main thing about Balatro which makes it my game of the year, is simple: it’s incredibly fun. Like, wow, this game is addicting. It’s super easy to get into, the tutorials explain everything clearly and concisely, and the gameplay loop never gets old. No run in this game is exactly the same, and that’s how a roguelike should be. There’s always a new way to win, a new way to lose, and a new way to experience things. Generally speaking, I get tired of games similar to Balatro after around 70 to 80 hours, mainly because I’ve seen everything I need to see, and the gameplay loop has gotten stale for me. Eventually, that fire dies out and is replaced by something else.

Balatro is an exception. I have unlocked every deck currently available on both my PC and my Switch, and I also got it on my phone recently because of the Christmas sales. I’ve won over 70 runs total on these three different systems, and whenever I feel like playing a game that isn’t one of the many story-based ones I’m currently slogging through (Disco Elysium being one of them, post about that might be coming soon), I play a couple runs of Balatro. My interest in this game has never waned, and my enjoyment of it has stayed about the same. It is exceedingly rare for a video game to grab me as much as Balatro has throughout 2024, and that deserves tons of praise in my book. That tells me that the developer did something right. Good games keep you interested for a bit of time, but truly great ones stick in your minds for months, maybe even years. I think you can guess which category I think this one falls under.

So yeah, I really, really like Balatro. It’s an incredible work, and I don’t feel any shame in calling it one of the best games I’ve ever played. Now, instead of me continuing to gush over it, I advise you to buy it when you have the time and try it out yourself. I have yet to find someone I know who’s played it and hasn’t fallen in love with it. Trust me, you’ll probably enjoy it, even if it isn’t as much as I do.

Thanks for reading, as usual. I’ve got a couple of posts I’m going to try to get out before the end of the year, one of them probably will be on sports betting, which is a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

God bless, and I’ll see all of you later.