Balatro was PC Gamer’s 2024 game of the year. But that was in a more innocent age before we had to endure wave after wave of imitators. Seemingly every casino classic has been plundered at this point, with Balatro-fied spins on blackjack, roulette, and even those coin-pusher machines that haunt crap arcades (to be fair, that one shares a publisher with Balatro and is kinda excellent).
Outside of the casino, it’s word game developers who are the most frequent vultures hungrily circling poor little Balatro. Er, poor little obscenely-rich-and-successful Balatro. I can see the temptation as these games prove over and over that it doesn’t take much to turn Scrabble into a roguelike deckbuilder. Give the player a ‘deck’ of letter tiles, reward them for spelling prowess, then let them manipulate their deck by buffing or removing tiles and voila! You’re now one of the 5,789,247 Balatro-y word games on Steam.
