Balatro, or, the Art of a Great Roguelike

The last 4 years have been the era of the roguelike for me. Starting with Hades, I have now played the following roguelikes.

1. Hades
2. Enter the Gungeon
3. Card Guardians
4. Slay the Spire
5. Vampire Survivors
6. Luck be a Landlord
7. Dicey Dungeons
8. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX
9. Dead Cells
10. Downwell
11. Solitairica
12. Balatro
13. Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon

The most interesting thing to me about this genre is how little like a genre it is. It’s almost like saying you like sports, but within “sports” you have competitions as diverse as track and field and table tennis. That’s not a great example, as the more direct comparison there would be between “sports” and “video games”, but I think it makes the distinction well enough. Hades and in some ways has far more in common with Diablo than with Slay the Spire, but there is an undeniable similarity between Spire and Hades that makes bunching them up understandable. I think the best understanding is that roguelike games cannot exist as a genre on their own, but only in combination with another genre to complete the picture. And here, I’m not really speaking about the original roguelikes, but more what the genre has come to stand for in the modern era (roguelites – which all of these are). Roguelikes are thus the video game emulsifier, taking a creative combination of features and melding them with different genres to create something that is greater than the sum of their parts.

So, what are the elements that make up a roguelike? I’m going to stick to the essentials, realizing that there are always different definitions and features. If you disagree, that’s fine.

1. The environmental challenges you face must be unique and different each time you do a new run.
2. Death happens to you, and you must return to the earliest part of the game after each death.
3. Characters must grow stronger, but there needs to be substantial luck involved in which upgrades become available each run.

And that’s it! Probably.

So that’s what makes a roguelike, but what makes a great roguelike? And which of the roguelikes that I have played are the best roguelikes?

1.       Engaging mechanics

The game must be fun to play. Period. You can slap the above features on a game, but it doesn’t make it good. The other mechanics that are added to the roguelike framework just need to be nailed.

2.       Death must be established as the normal end for new players

These games need to be difficult, necessitating significant skill development along the way to result in victory.

3.       Lucky options need to be available to make extremely memorable “godlike” runs a possibility, even for new players

Everyone needs to have a little encouragement to persist in a challenging environment. A great roguelike makes it possible that even new players get a taste of what it means to be unstoppable, even just for a short period of a run.

4.       The environment must have a wide range of challenges that make each run unique

No one wants to see the same stuff every single time. Vary it up!

5.       The available character upgrades must have a wide enough range of options to make identical runs impossible or nearly impossible

Every run must challenge your brain to craft a unique path through the challenges with your available resources.

6.       Must be tuned to allow a wide variety of available strategies to complete the game

This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a favorite approach or one that works for you. Or that there can’t be a tier list of stronger or weaker strategies/upgrades. But there should be few “useless” upgrades and a lot of hard choices along the way as you are presented with a wide range of powerful upgrades, all of which you can credibly use to overcome the challenges that lie ahead.

7.       Synergy, synergy, synergy

Your upgrades must have synergistic interactions that raise or lower the value of individual items/stats/equipment depending on your current build. This creates an incentive to think critically about upgrades rather than always snap grabbing a few overall dominant improvements whenever they’re available.

8.       Strong presentation value

The game should look and sound nice.

So, let’s go ahead and rank the roguelikes I’ve played according to these standards. I gave each game a score in each category from 1-5. If 5, I think it’s the best I could expect in this category, if 1, I think it’s little to no effort.

Game	Fun	Challenge	Luck	Diverse Env.	Diverse Char.	Diverse Strat.	Synergy	Presentation	Avg.
Slay the Spire	5	5	5	4	5	5	5	2	4.5
Balatro	5	3	5	2	5	3	5	5	4.13
Enter the Gungeon	5	5	4	3	5	2	3	4	3.88
Hades	4	4	2	2	4	3	4	5	3.5
Dead Cells	4	4	4	1	3	2	4	4	3.48
Vampire Survivors	5	4	5	1	2	2	2	5	3.25
Luck be a Landlord	3	2	5	1	2	3	5	4	3.13
Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon	3	4	3	2	3	3	2	4	3.00
Dicey Dungeons	3	3	1	2	2	2	1	4	2.25
Card Guardians	2	2	4	1	3	1	2	3	2.25
Solitairica	3	4	1	1	1	1	2	3	2
Downwell	3	3	1	1	1	1	2	4	2
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team GX	2	2	1	1	2	2	2	3	1.88

To no one’s surprise, Slay the Spire reigns supreme, and I would suspect it always will. I could think of some ways in which it could be a bit better. Maybe the upcoming sequel, a guaranteed day one purchase for me, will improve on the game. The animations are pretty weak and the challenges do get a little repetitive at times. But the fine developers at Mega Crit absolutely crushed it in every other category. I played it first in 2022, and I still play it pretty much every day. I don’t think there’s any question that if I was picking a single desert island video game, this would be it. I think there are some other games that are better, strictly speaking, but this is the game that has the best single player replayability of any game, ever.

Balatro, which I am in the middle of playing, slots in right behind Spire at number 2. I knew I would love this game, and was delighted to have it show up on Playstation Plus this month. Hours later, and I see what everyone has been talking about! I love poker, I love roguelikes, and I love deckbuilders (whether in video game form or not). Balatro checks a ton of boxes with some of the craziest synergy I have ever seen in a roguelike.

The biggest edge that this game has from a design perspective is the uncertain buildup when you submit your hand but are not sure how many chips you’re going to end up getting. It’s like the tension of watching a three pointer launch and feeling the Schroedinger’s cat of success and failure in real time. In Balatro, you can do some mental math to put yourself in the ballpark, but the game simultaneously simplifying and obscuring the outcome into a series of chimes and rolling numbers and flames gives it a slot machine type of feedback that gets its hooks into you and won’t let go.

In many ways, Spire and Balatro are opposite ends of the roguelike spectrum. Spire opts for the more calculated, intellectual, board game approach, eschewing visual polish in service of maximum strategy and precision. Balatro lets the chips fly and embraces the flash and chaos of Vampire Survivors and Luck be a Landlord. Both are phenomenal.

The crazy thing about all these roguelikes is that I enjoyed every single one of them, even those that are ranked low on the rubric. There’s something about the roguelike emulsifier that scratches my lizard brain, and I can’t wait to dive into a few more in the next few years! If you haven’t given any of these a shot before, pick one that has an underlying control scheme you like, and try it. Love hack and slash? Go Hades! Poker/traditional card games? Try Balatro. Love deckbuilding board/card games like Clank or Legendary? Give Spire a go. Twin stick shooters? Enter the Gungeon. There’s something in this genre for everyone. Jump on board the train, my friends!

-TRO