We discussed the kinda poker-themed and vaguely roguelike-ish game Balatro, with Darren Grey and Mark Johnson.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Synopsis & Useful Links
- What Balatro is, and how it's definitely not a "poker roguelike" as it often gets called
- Awards for Balatro, its positive press attention, and how it's the triumph of a solo dev, LocalThunk
- How the game works and integrates poker theming without really having any relation to poker gameplay
- Deck management aspects of the game
- Replayability through difficulty modes, starting decks, Joker variety and challenge modes
- How the game encourages you to focus on a specific strategy early on, limiting density of decision-making as the game progresses
- Balatro as a cookie-clicker, numbers-go-up style of game, with skinner box mechanics and uses of chance that compel you to play further
- Addiction, and how Darren felt addicted to the game and had to delete it from his phone
- The Jokers mechanic, and the interesting decisions it creates
- Defacing and upgrading cards in a fun theme with holograms, stamps, etc
- What is the mastery level of the game? What will the Balatro meta look like after a few years? How do the chance-based mechanics affect this?
I thought that an episode about Balatro could try to explain why some people call Balatro roguelike, rather than just say "it is not". It makes no sense for people who who have played actual roguelikes, but it is not the first confusing game like this: before it we had Risk of Rain, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, or various "what if [an arcade game that was randomized anyway] was a roguelike". These games do not have procedurally generated maps (or only weakly), and come from inspirations which were alerady randomized and permadeath. But what they share is a huge focus on synergizing upgrades -- which is NOT actually a roguelike element, but an innovation of The Binding of Isaac -- Edmund McMillen did not know how to call TBoI (as he said in his RR episode) and then people taking inspiration from it also do not know how to call them and call them roguelike, even if they did not share the roguelike elements of TBoI. I call such games engine builders, and hope the terms will clear up eventually. (I have also posted a longer analysis on my Medium blog.)
ReplyDeleteI think that asking "what makes a game to be like poker, poker hands or the fact that you are making high-stake decisions without access to full information?" is a bit like "what makes a game to be like Rogue, the way you move or the fact that you are making high-stake decisions without access to full information?". Although yeah, Poker but based on some completely different patterns would still feel like Poker, while Big Two (the game that Balatro is actually based on) does not, even though it uses poker hands.
Score-chasing is a relatively rarely discussed part of the roguelike philosophy. Classic roguelikes had highscore lists, with 100 entries and explaining the reasons for death, which typically IMO were not that great for rating successful runs, but they brought some meaning to "failed" runs -- if you beat your top highscore so far, the run was actually successful, and from the listed reasons of death could give some hints on what you are doing wrong. I feel this aspect is often overlooked today. (Of course we had Roguelike Radio 41.) I dislike the exponential growth, though, in my deckbuilder Seuphorica I have made multipliers usually additive, so the growth of score is intended to be cubic (or so).
I think we might also talk about how Balatro is marketed. I see the following lines of marketing, most of which seem controversial to me:
* "poker roguelike", probably sounds so nonsensical that people want to check it out?
* "this game is very addictive", which sounds a negative for me, I expect the game to be a Skinner box that people become addicted to not because the gameplay is actually good, but because of dark psychological tricks, as discussed in the episode. (If the gameplay was actually good, they would rather try to explain why.)
* "lots of people play this game" (so what? Pixel Dungeon had 10x as many downloads on Android as Balatro currently has.)
* solo dev -- but I think the game owes lots of the success not to LocalThunk's ideas but to its marketing, which is, as far as I understand, done mostly by the publisher. And LocalThunk seems to have appeared out of nowhere, has more viral marketing posts than talking about themselves, etc. This makes it not feel like one man's success story to me.
Honestly when I looked at this episode title, I felt it was a little bit of a weak subject to go over.
ReplyDeleteSomething like Spelunky, The Binding of Issac, Unexplored, or FTL: Faster Than Light, and Diablo are fine - they clearly have something noteworthy to discuss in traditional roguelike circles; be it because of history, game mechanics, design philosophy, or what not. Balatro is not really connected in anyway to the roots of the genre.
Perhaps this is an episode to build into a future one discussing roguelike definitions - specifically in regards to how far can the boundaries be pushed, before you push outside those boundaries?