Now, however, as much as Balatro is Not Gambling, it is still a dangerous, terrible addiction. Please check on your loved ones if they start playing Balatro, especially if they have the phone app downloaded. The app is not a casino but works on similar psychological manipulations such as hiding your phone's clock, denying you any sense of time or place, leaving nothing but flashing lights and numbers. Their lives are on a downward spiral and they will need care and support. They might not listen to anything you're saying since odds are they'll be looking down at their phones, playing Balatro. Please give them understanding because they are no longer in control of themselves. Balatro is a disease. Abstain from moral judgments towards the sufferers.
I spent $10 to get Balatro on my phone back in January and that was the entirety of the sum I risked for my entertainment. After all, it is Not Gambling. However, if we consider that at the moment my time is worth something like $30 an hour and that I have spent somewhere in the region of hundreds of hours playing Balatro in the first quarter of 2025, really I'm down thousands of dollars lost from potentially productive time. To complicate this I have definitely played whole games of Balatro while on the clock at a job. (Mr. or Mrs. Eric's Boss, you are not allowed to read this - you may leave the room now.) That time however could have been spent on more production neoliberal activities such as actually gambling on sports or crypto-currencies. Just think of all the economic progress I could be achieving playing real Poker instead of fake electronic nonsense Poker!
Clearly I am an antisocial terrorist with my deviant behavior of not maximizing my grindset every second of my life. I instead am playing a game with no real point or aim. That I am willfully a wasteful and not maximally productive member of society is not really the problem for me. The problem is that I can't stop. Balatro has devoured my gaming life. I am searching for an escape and cannot find one.
Typically my gaming habits involve things like say, Metaphor: ReFantazio, a game of clear forward action, numbers always going up, days always progressing linearly, and every minute leading towards a Final Boss and a story conclusion. At which point the game is over, I'm done, and I typically never touch it again, regardless of opinion. I find a kind of philosophical opposition in me when it comes to RogueLikes/RogueLites. I just hate having to go back after I lose. I am deeply impatient person by nature. I don't like the idea of time being wasted because I was a failure. There have only ever been a handful of Roguish games I've enjoyed: say Crypt of the NecroDancer, or Into the Breach. and I enjoyed them largely in spite of their Rogue-adjacent qualities. My opinion of them is often "well that was cool, but I'd rather it had a real campaign" (Into the Breach) or "I honestly only ever needed to beat this once and I'm bored of you now" (Hades).
Balatro, however, does not actually have an ending like say, Hades. You can beat it, you can beat all its challenges and all its varieties, and then what? There's no End Credits. No conclusion. No accomplishment really. Even a "victory" is totally arbitrary and unsatisfying. It is just the eighth round of a run, which continues endlessly past that. The truth is that you never win in Balatro. The numbers will always get higher and higher to the point that either you're overwhelmed or the game reaches its computational limit and gives up. That limit exists somewhere in the realm of numbers followed by thirty three zeroes. However, there exists mods of the game where you can push your super gaming computer to the absolute limit and hit a googol or double-googol, and onward until your PC crashes. I've never gotten nearly to that point and never will.
The point is that no matter how Balatro ends, it never really ends. I just play another game of Balatro after I lose or more rarely "win". The addiction is not tamed or quieted, it just continues for all eternity. The game is as infinite as the set of integers are infinite. There's no closure, there's just more of it.
By the standards of "how much time has this game absorbed out of me?", Balatro is a masterpiece. It is basically the only thing I played for three straight months. Balatro's addictive qualities are perhaps the same inexplicable brilliance that makes a movie endlessly re-watchable or a song never escape your mind. There's just an abundance of mental energy floating around in humanity that needs some kind of outlet, why not a game about cards and Jokers? Life is short but it is also uncountable eternities of boredom, you know that. Why not spend it hunting for Flushes? Why should I demand more from Balatro except that Balatro exist as Balatro? Art should not be productive in any way. Therefore our modern grindset economy is by its very nature anti-art, which might be why its greatest creation is what the tech ghouls are calling "AI", a way to completely devalue and destroy the very craft of artistry. So maybe Balatro, by having no greater meaning of any kind, is the purest art of all with them most revolutionary potential against the nightmare of late-late-late-capitalism.
On the other hand, I feel deeply unsatisfied by Balatro. The game's brilliance is so simple, so seemingly effortless, that like Tetris, maybe the most perfect engine of pure gaming joy ever designed, what is there to say? Balatro's OST is just one track that modulates over and over, and like like the game itself, it is somehow soothing, dramatic, exciting, and inexplicable all at the same time. There was more hype for the few seconds of the one Balatro song playing at The Game Awards' orchestra than any other moment of that show last fall. Really though I'm useless as a music critic. I cannot tell you why this one song works, I completely lack the language to deconstruct a composition. But also, I'm probably useless as a game critic too because I barely understand why I like Balatro. It just "is". And without some deeper meaning that I can discover about the self, the art of creation, the world around, what even is there left? I'm just railing at nothing. I'm still playing but I don't I'm learning anything or making a coherent argument. If I had a windmill to point my spear at it, I'd be making more sense.
I guess I can say this: Balatro is a great demonstration of how scaling works mathematically. Linear rates of growth are quickly defeated by exponential growth. You start out with a goal of merely winning a few hundred chips in a few hands, which is trivial since any good five cards made out of with face cards will that many points. By the end of the run the game is demanding hundreds of thousands to millions of chips. The growths you can achieve are either by how much a hand multiplies your chips (a Flush, for example starts at times 4) or by adding more chips in the pot, sometimes both at the same time. But you learn at some point that, adding multiplications is just addition. It is weak. 5 x 10 versus 5 x 20 is just a difference of 100, not good enough. By the end of the Balatro run, what you harder stuff. Gather a lot of cards that doubles or triples your score and you're 'going to the moon' as the Reddit gamblers like to say. And eventually even that is going to be insufficient. On a long enough timeline, there is no growth fast enough to ever keep up; Balatro never gives you any exponents, tragically. At most, I've achieved a score of about a quadrillion or so. Balatro can scale so large that are more chips than atoms in the known universe. You cannot win when the numbers are so huge they have no meaningful comparison to anything in physical reality. Sure, with a very precise set-up you can reach a kill screen, but shut up, nerd. I'm talking about Chasing a Dragon here, the point is never to actually catch it.
And to the Balatro's credit it has a fascinating mechanic of balancing forms of growth. You gain money (not real money, you greedy fucks, go back to GameStop meme coins) which can be used to buy a variety of options. Planet and Tarot cards allow you to customize the deck or make the base hand scores larger. But the real core are the Jokers, the special effect cards that could be immensely helpful or disastrous. It is all random which Joker you get, but you can see if you find say, a Joker that gives plus five mult to Face Cards, along with a Joker that duplicates your the first card in your hand three times, and another Joker that doubles the score of your first Face Card, that a strategy has been aligned for you. That is times 30 right there. Start building your deck with a lot of Queens and maybe Full Houses or Four of a Kind can be immensely powerful. To the point that you're scoring hundreds of thousands of points way ahead of schedule.
But also, maybe its round 8 and you cannot get a goddamn Queen for the Full House you need that you've built your entire strategy around. Sometimes you just get boned. I lost the run I just described at the 'final boss'. Was it my fault? I don't know. I could have planned better, I could have saved more money just in case, I could have built a strategy dependent on more cards, but the game kept giving me Queens. I think I just got fucked and that's the Balatro life. This game isn't literally gambling but much like gambling, there is a cruelty to Balatro. Everything comes up Millhouse until suddenly, for no reason to which we can ascribe moral judgement, the Millhousing just stops. Then you're Millhouse's dad, sleeping alone in a Race Car bed.
I feel like I reached a kind of plateau with Balatro months ago when I beat the highest level, Gold Stake. I went on to complete every Challenge in the app, including one that was Joker-less. Jokers are so core to all strategems in Balatro that losing them is like trying to get through Super Mario 64 without using the Jump button. Still I did that! I conquered this game backwards and forwards as far as I'm concerned. There are Youtubers who seem to be supreme masters who can achieve the bonkers Quadrillion and Octillion and Decillion scores I do not think I'll ever get. Oh well. That ain't me.
There basically is no point to playing any longer. I have nothing left to prove. Yet here I go again, putting in another run. Got an hour to kill, why not Balatro it up again? I need to sleep, but hey, one more run before dozing off. How much can it hurt? (Editor note: It can hurt immensely.)
This is ultimately what people most do, it seems. This is the shift in gaming as a hobby. People find their One Game and make it, maybe not their whole personality, but a long-running obsession that can fill huge holes in their life. I don't think I want that though. I almost made Overwatch and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate my One Game during various periods in my life, and ended up largely resenting those games and my own inability to get better. I don't care to master anything, actually. I want to put a game down and move on to the next thing. I think I resent Balatro for its lack of conclusion, it's lack of a moment that says "you're done, son, go home". It feels like a house guest that has overstayed its welcome, who I cannot quite work up the courage to ask to leave. Balatro is not a pastime, it is a problem.
There is a vast galaxy of games I'd like to play with clear beginnings and endings. Those games can be checklisted off and put away and added to my personal collection of "experiences had". I played Monument Valley 2 last night, it took an hour and half and I feel like a million dollars for achieving something. It is a beautiful little game and it is on Netflix for free right now. Similarly, I bet you want to hear about my Metaphor: ReFantazio thoughts and how its vision of electoral politics is woefully insufficient for our current crisis. Well, you might not even get that post because I still play a lot of Balatro. This game might be personally responsible for why I do not have a Top 10 List for 2024. It just ate so much time. There is no getting away from it. I've played this game a dozen ways, tried a million strategies, unlocked nearly every card, got funky and unorthodox, played risky, played like my Grandma, and in the end I've learned nothing. I've achieved nothing.
There is nothing except another run. I could own a house right now with the winnings from all the real gambling victories I could have had. Or I could be destitute beyond words, a wage slave to some dudebro twentysomething with a fortune of DOGEcoin after all the more likely gambling defeats I could have had. Either way, it would have been good old fashioned economic activity. Like a God Fearing American hero I should be risking it all on preposterous chance goals and stimulating the markets. That would have been useful to us all. Instead I failed this country because I sat on my ass and got addicting to something useless like Balatro.
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