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When Balatro was released on consoles earlier this year, Charlie Brooker described it as “possibly the most addictive thing ever created”. The Black Mirror creator added: “It’s going to be released on phones, and at that point I think humankind’s activity is going to drop about 25 per cent.”
Expect the next season of Black Mirror to be four and a half episodes rather than six, then, because as of this week the poker-based deck-building game is now available on iOS and Android. That’s a potential audience in the billions — not that anyone anticipated the more than 2mn sales that followed the game’s console release in February.
What makes Balatro so addictive? Put bluntly, the same feedback loop you may recognise from such pastimes as, well, gambling. The game revolves around playing poker hands from cards in a deck — only there are no other players or competing hands to defeat. Instead, different hands and different cards are assigned values, and your aim is to achieve a certain score to progress to the next round.
After each round, you visit a shop where you can acquire tools to improve your chances of success: jokers that affect how your cards score and interact with one another; tarot cards that can skew the composition of the deck in your favour. But, most importantly, once you’ve paid your £9.99 for the game, you’re only ever staking theoretical chips, not real money. Instead of reacting to a disappointing result with a groan or a cold sweat, you learn to incorporate it into your long-term strategy.
Each run consists of eight antes, which are, in turn, comprised of a small blind, a big blind, and then a boss. If you fail to meet the score for any of these rounds, the run is over and you start the whole thing again with a reset deck. In this respect, it resembles a roguelike game, where a single, extended playthrough is snubbed in favour of short, ever-changing runs whose variety stems from unlocking new game mechanics as you go.
All of which suits the smartphone very well, because a run rarely lasts more than an hour or so — perfect for a medium-sized train journey or meeting. The drag-and-drop mechanics have been cleverly translated to a touchscreen, although you’ll need to be just that little bit more careful when selecting cards, lest a wayward six ruin your painstakingly put-together royal flush.
Unchanged are the wonderfully retro VCR-style visuals, lo-fi music and irreverent sound effects, which evoke a strange mix of space and spiritualism. You can imagine stumbling upon an arcade machine in an abandoned mall, its sides emblazoned with Balatro in a melting typeface, convincing yourself it’s the most brilliant thing you’ve ever played and then returning to reality to be told that no such game ever existed.
It is to the detriment of everyone’s productivity that it does. Balatro is as compelling as the worst kind of microtransaction-riddled, attention-hogging mobile title, but in an infinitely weirder and cleverer way. When you find yourself starting a new game as soon as the old one draws to a close, it will be for the sheer joy of it — not to claw back your losses.
★★★★★
Available on Android and iOS now
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