Ben's 2024 Indie Game of the Year: Balatro

There's really no argument here for me. As someone who has spent countless hours playing poker, blackjack, palace, rummy, solitaire, you name it, all to chip away and entertain myself and friends during school and university, the very nature of a poker-based roguelike was a very dangerous idea to me. And boy did Balatro not disappoint on this front.

Designed by a one-man team, this game took the timeless and easy rules of poker and contorted it into a twisted, maniacally-addictive, and engaging roguelike where one game is never enough. The strategy and deck-building systems combined with the brutal luck of the draw that playing cards has always presented meant that Balatro never felt repetitive nor boring and managed to make hours feel like minutes.

It's the perfect storm of entertaining elements, a firm example of how refined gameplay is the most important part of the interactive entertainment medium. Sure flashy and realistic graphics are cool, and immense scale and size is useful for making a game feel more packed than it really is, but Balatro proves with effortless ease that simplistic gameplay trumps all of this. LocalThunk had a straightforward and clear vision for what Balatro needed to be and delivered that with such class and quality that there was and is never any need or desire for Balatro to be more than what it is. It's a truly perfect evolution of the poker ruleset and at the same time, one of the most compelling and enjoyable roguelikes I have experienced.

There isn't much that Balatro did poorly, but perhaps one of this game's strongest elements is also just how consumer friendly it is. You can play Balatro almost anywhere, on more platforms than most games and at a price point that is cheaper than a few pints at a local Wetherspoons. This is one of very few games that I would recommend to almost anyone, regardless of their interest in roguelikes, deck-building, card games, or video games as a whole, and it's partly for this reason, combined with what I mentioned above, that Balatro is firmly my top indie game of 2024, and if there was an award for it, probably also my runner-up for 2024's Game of the Year.