No game this year has captured the imagination of the Engadget team more Balatro did so, and when it came time for each staff member to present their favorite games of 2024everyone – and I mean everyone – wanted to write about Balatro. Ultimately, rather than forcing everyone to fight for the chance to write about their love of the game, we instead decided to have the team write their own individual take on the game. Balatro.
My Steam Deck is a Balatro machine and I love it
My Steam bridge is a Balatro machine at this point, and no, I’m not complaining. I have already used my Steam Deck for many games Balatro and I plan to play it a lot more in the future, but for now and potentially until my last breath, its main function is wild card generation.
First of all, Balatro it’s just nice on a portable device. It’s the kind of game you can play passively while watching TV or listening to a podcast, or with intense concentration as you try to collect wilds, stakes, achievements, and stickers on the path to Completionist++. The Steam Deck is the ideal platform for this type of game, because, especially in combination with a comfortable PC configuration, it allows players to move between these two states without losing their progress. The mobile version of Balatro is great and the Switch version is perfect, but I started playing on PC and, over 500 hours later, I’m hesitant to start again on another platform.
I love to snuggle up on the couch with Balatroplaying it on my office PC, using it as a distraction on long commutes, and getting in a few hands before bed. THE Balatro Machine – er, I mean, Steam Deck – seamlessly enables my obsession.
— Jessica Conditt, senior reporter
Balatro is a card game you can feel
Balatro is a game you play mostly in your head. There’s a giant array of modifier cards, each with their own effects and consequences, and you work on their permutations like you’re tinkering with a chemistry set. It’s a game of decisions, all of which depend on the decisions you’ve made before. Some work, most blow up in your face.
This is what makes Balatro engaging, but that’s not what I prefer. What I love most is how tangible it is. How does a digital playing card deck make a real impact. It’s the little one well and shake each card when it is marked. THE donk when a wild adds to your multiplier, the way the donks speed up and increase height as buffs and retriggers accumulate. THE thrrrp of the redistribution of cards. The brief delay when opening a booster to build anticipation, the way the pack disintegrates to emphasize the finality of your decision. The sound of coins colliding when you collect interest or buy something. The fire that burns and rises around your score when you’ve passed the goal with one hand, a hit of dopamine within a hit of dopamine. The way the air is sucked out of transexual music when you inevitably fail.
You are not a character in Balatro. It’s just you, looking at cards placed on swirling colors. Yet all these flourishes go a long way toward sucking you into that vortex, actually trapping you in it, somehow giving a game most like video poker a sense of physical place. Balatro is, among other things, an A-1 example of economical sound design. The easiest way to dilute it is to play it muted.
— Jeff Dunn, senior reporter
The real Balatro is the wild stickers we earned along the way.
I’m not an achievement chaser – I’m the type of person who skips side quests that aren’t interesting and rarely replays games after completing them. The only “Platinum” game in my PlayStation collection is the PS4 version of Resogunand I have absolutely no games on Xbox. Why, then, is 2024 the year I became obsessed with achieving Completionist++ on Balatro?
I received the Steam Completionist achievement, which you get by discovering all the maps in the game, after a month of playing the game. It took me another five months to get Completionist+, awarded to those who beat Ante 8 with each deck on gold difficulty. The only thing left for me to do was the hardest challenge in the game: Competitionist++, which involves getting gold stickers on each joker by beating Ante 8 on gold difficulty with each of them active.
As of this writing, Completionist++ is still a distant dream. It’s easy to feel like you’ve mastered the game after beating Completionist+; There are simple wild card combinations that can take you past Ante 8 with every deck. Completionist++ removes these safety nets from you, forcing you to beat the game’s hardest level without relying on foolproof strategies. Although I sometimes miss my first scores, with BalatroThis challenge has given the game a whole new dynamic for me, as I figure out how to win with wild cards that I previously considered useless.
If you’ve cleared all the hurdles and are wondering what to do next, Completionist++ is a challenge worth taking on. Just a word of warning: I played for 460 hours on my PC and Steam Deck, and I only unlocked 961 of the game’s 1,200 stickers.
— Aaron Souppouris, editor-in-chief
Balatro is a deep and complex game for dirty casuals like me
Some of my friends and colleagues take Balatro to wild extremes. Aaron told me he was unlocked and had completed about 95% of the game; Meanwhile, I’m sitting at a paltry 19 percent. Another friend regularly shares quick videos of his runs where he racks up hundreds of millions of points in a single hand with Jokers that I can’t figure out, while my best hand is just over 3 million .
The good thing, though? This is not discouraging; It’s a feature, not a bug. Balatro has somehow managed to be the kind of game you can sink hundreds of hours into in a total quest for completion and mastery. Or you can do like me and pick it up again, playing for 30 minutes or an hour a few times a week, and coming back to it with plenty to do when you get the itch.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to get to the point where I collect a billion points on one hand, but my gaming time is limited and I usually choose to spend it on the PS5. But one of the great joys of Balatro is that you can go into a bender and play it for hours, then not return to it for days or weeks, and then just pick it up again and keep progressing. You won’t lose any skills or forget your goals. This is a casual, easy-to-play game that also hides incredible depth, and games like this don’t come around too often.
— Nathan Ingraham, associate editor
Balatro is a near-perfect mobile port
2024 is undoubtedly the year of Balatro. It came out of nowhere and filled our heads with dreams of five colors and legendary Jimbos. But I think what really brought it to the forefront was when it launched on iOS and Android earlier this fall. Not only does the mobile version cost $5 less than the desktop edition on Steam (or console ports), but there are no intrusive ads or additional purchases anywhere in the game. This includes all back of crossover cards (like those featuring characters from The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077 and more) and the big update coming should be released early next year.
On top of that, there is virtually no difference in features between the mobile and desktop/console versions. Granted, a lot of this is due to the game being a relatively simple title (at least in terms of graphics). But even so, you’d be surprised how easy it is to get it wrong. The game starts almost instantly and even when you’re crushing the antes while pushing your score in scientific notation, the system doesn’t bog down. Add in a satisfying interface, support for cloud saves, multiple languages and profiles as well as a high contrast option ideal for accessibility, and you have an app that works well on virtually any device.
In fact, I’d say foldable devices like the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 are the perfect devices for chasing wild cards. Their large screens seem perfectly suited to Balatro without ever feeling cramped, which sometimes happens on older gadgets with less spacious screens. The text is generally easy to read (although sometimes less so on smaller devices) and there’s plenty of open space to move things around without getting in the way. I have a few minor complaints which you can read about in my longer article at Balatro beauty on mobile devicesbut overall, I’m confident I’ll get more bang for my buck in the years to come.
— Sam Rutherford, senior reporter
