Review: Balatro

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Arleigh

It is incredibly rare to find a game that completely takes over your brain in the way that Balatro has. Developed by a solo creator going by the name LocalThunk and published by Playstack, this little indie game dropped out of nowhere and quickly became one of the most talked-about releases of the year. On the surface, it looks like a pretty standard digital poker game. You have a deck of cards, you get dealt a hand, and you try to make the best poker hand possible. But spend about five minutes with it, and you will quickly realize that Balatro is not actually a poker game at all. It is a brilliantly disguised roguelike deck-builder that uses the universal language of poker hands as its foundation to create one of the most addicting gameplay loops I have ever experienced.

The core mechanics start off simple enough to teach anyone, even if you have never played a card game in your life. You are trying to beat a certain score threshold, known as a blind, by playing poker hands. A pair gives you a base amount of chips and a small multiplier. A flush gives you more chips, and a straight flush gives you even more. You play through a series of antes, and the score requirements get higher and higher as you progress. If you fail to reach the score limit with the hands you are dealt, your run is over and you have to start from scratch. It sounds like standard video poker, but the magic of Balatro lies in what happens between these hands.

This is where the deck-building and roguelike elements come crashing in to completely warp your perspective on playing cards. After every blind, you visit a shop where you can spend your hard-earned money on various upgrades. The most important of these are Jokers. You can have up to five Jokers at a time, and each one fundamentally breaks the rules of poker in wildly different ways. One Joker might give you a massive multiplier every time you play a pair. Another might destroy a card in your hand and give you extra chips for each card destroyed. Another might only activate if you play a hand that contains a spade. Suddenly, you are no longer trying to play the statistically best poker hand. You are trying to play the hand that best satisfies the chaotic rules of your specific Jokers.

The deck-building goes even deeper when you factor in the other items you can buy in the shop. Planet cards permanently level up specific poker hands, meaning your flushes will naturally score more points without needing a Joker to boost them. Tarot cards let you literally alter your deck by changing the suit of a card, turning a card into a wild card, or destroying cards outright to thin your deck and increase your chances of drawing the cards you actually need. Spectral cards offer high-risk, high-reward effects that can either make your run legendary or immediately ruin it. If you have ever played a game like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, you will feel right at home with how these systems interlock, but Balatro manages to feel entirely fresh because of its playing card aesthetic.

As a roguelike, the game structure demands that you adapt to what the game gives you. You cannot force a flush-focused build if the shop only gives you Jokers that synergize with pairs and high cards. You have to pivot your strategy on the fly, which leads to these beautifully chaotic runs where you end up winning through sheer absurdity. To keep you on your toes, every eighth blind is a Boss Blind. These bosses apply a universal handicap to your run, like disabling the effect of all face cards, or making it so playing a straight actually deducts points. Beating a Boss Blind requires you to either build an incredibly versatile deck or find a specific Joker that completely ignores the boss’s rules, which is immensely satisfying when you pull it off.

The real triumph of Balatro, however, is just how unbelievably addicting its game loop is, and how that addiction directly feeds into the creation of utterly insane deck combos. Because the game constantly drip-feeds you new jokers and upgrades after every single round, you are always chasing that next layer of synergy. This creates a compulsion loop where you just want to see how far the math can go. What starts as a humble run trying to scrape together a few thousand points with a basic pair suddenly spirals completely out of control. You might pick up a Joker that gives you an x3 multiplier for every face card discarded, then find a planet card that buffs your straight, and then grab another Joker that doubles your entire score if you have exactly four cards left in your hand. Before you know it, the addictive nature of wanting to complete that puzzle pushes your scoring into the absolute stratosphere. You will find yourself playing a single pair of twos and watching the score ticker fly into the millions, then the billions, and occasionally even the trillions. The game loop tricks your brain into treating poker hands like puzzle pieces, and the ultimate reward for solving that puzzle is seeing numbers climb to absurd, astronomical heights that make no logical sense for a standard 52-card deck.

It also helps that the presentation is absolutely spot-on for this type of experience. The user interface is clean and easy to read, which is crucial when you have fifteen different modifiers happening at once and your score is rocketing into the billions. The visual style has a retro, slightly gritty CRT vibe to it that feels mysterious and cool. But the real standout is the sound design. The tactile thwack of the cards hitting the table, the escalating, hypnotic hum of the music as your score multiplier climbs higher and higher, and the incredibly satisfying sound of a massive score being calculated all tie the experience together perfectly. It is a game that feels incredible to just interact with on a moment-to-moment basis.

In a modern gaming landscape that is increasingly obsessed with massive scale, Balatro feels like a beautiful breath of fresh air. The game doesn’t rely on hyperrealistic graphics using the latest game engines with all the bells and whistles that has made game development as expensive, if not even moreso, than the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, but also made their development years in the making. Instead, it leans entirely into the simplicity of its look paired with incredibly complex mechanics under the hood. This brilliant design choice has made it incredibly easy to release on pretty much every platform from every game console, PC and mobile platform. You don’t need a pricey rig to run it; you just need a screen and a functioning brain to appreciate the sheer depth of its systems.

Balatro is a masterclass in game design. LocalThunk took something as simple and universally understood as a deck of playing cards and turned it into a sprawling, deeply strategic, and infinitely replayable roguelike. It takes the best parts of deck-builders and marries them to the instantly recognizable framework of poker, resulting in a game that is easy to learn but nearly impossible to put down. Playstack has an absolute monster hit on their hands here, and I can confidently say that if you have even a passing interest in card games, strategy games, or just games with incredibly tight gameplay loops, you owe it to yourself to play Balatro. Just make sure you do not have anything important to do for the next few days, because once this game gets its hooks in you, it will not let go.

Review: Dredge

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Arleigh

When you boot up Dredge, you might think you are getting a relaxing, Stardew Valley-style fishing experience where you just kick back, cast a line, and listen to lo-fi beats. But developer Black Salt Games and publisher Team17 had something much weirder and far more sinister in store. You play as a nameless fisherman who arrives in a strangely secluded archipelago called the Marrows, and right from the jump, things feel incredibly off. You are given a rundown boat and told to catch fish to make money, but the game slowly peels back its layers to reveal something deeply unsettling lurking beneath the waves. It is a game that takes the most mundane aspects of the fishing sim genre and twists them into a brilliant, unforgettable blend of survival, horror, and puzzle mechanics.

Let’s talk about the actual fishing mechanics because they are surprisingly robust and satisfying. You are not just mashing a button to reel in a generic fish. As you progress through the game, you unlock different rods, crab pots, and trawling nets, each requiring a slightly different approach to use effectively. There is a simple but engaging timing-based mini-game for reeling that varies depending on the size and rarity of the catch, keeping you on your toes. Catching common fish like mackerel or cod is a breeze, but when you hook something aberrant or otherworldly, the mini-game gets incredibly frantic. The game does a fantastic job of making you feel like a competent angler while constantly introducing new species and equipment to keep the core gameplay loop from going stale.

But the real genius of Dredge lies in its inventory management, which essentially turns your boat into a spatial puzzle game. Your catch does not just magically go into a bottomless bag; you have to physically slot fish into a grid on your boat’s deck. Different fish take up different amounts of space, shaped like Tetris blocks. A small anchovy takes up one square, while a massive shark might take up four or five. As your boat gets bigger, so does the grid, but you also have to fit engine upgrades, tighter nets, and refrigerated storage on that exact same grid. You are constantly playing a game of spatial Tetris while out on the water, deciding if you have room for that highly valuable abyssal fish or if you need to toss out some common junk to make space.

This is where the survival mechanics start to bleed into the gameplay, and it is also exactly where the horror starts to creep in. During the day, Dredge feels almost peaceful. The pixel art is gorgeous, the water looks serene, and the locals at the docks are quirky but polite. But once the sun goes down, the entire vibe of the game shifts dramatically. A thick, suffocating fog rolls in, your visibility drops to almost nothing, and the soundtrack changes to something deeply oppressive. You start to hear strange noises in the water, and if you linger out in the dark too long, your screen starts to warp and distort as your character’s mind begins to fracture.

This introduces the panic meter, which is easily one of the most stressful survival mechanics I have played with in a long time. If you stay in the dark or get too close to the rogue eldritch horrors swimming around the islands, your panic goes up. If it maxes out, you crash your boat and wake up having lost a chunk of your hard-earned catch and inventory space. You also have to manage your hull integrity, because ramming into rocks or getting smacked by a sea monster costs you money and risks sinking your only means of survival. Add in the need to manage your fuel to get back to port and your sleep meter to avoid passing out, and you suddenly realize you are not playing a cozy fishing game anymore. You are playing a tense resource management game where one wrong decision in the dark can completely ruin your entire run.

The way Dredge mashes up these seemingly incompatible genres is incredibly seamless. It takes the soothing, methodical loop of a game like Moonglow Bay or Animal Crossing and injects it directly with the survival anxiety of Don’t Starve and the creeping cosmic dread of a game like Call of Cthulhu. You want to push your luck and stay out late to catch that one rare nocturnal fish, but the survival mechanics punish you harshly for being greedy. The horror elements do not just serve as cheap jump scares, either; they are baked directly into the fishing mechanics. Some rare fish can only be caught during a blood moon or in the darkest parts of the ocean, forcing you to navigate through pitch-black waters filled with terrifying rock formations and unseen monsters just to fill out your encyclopedia.

Exploring the world is a joy in itself, even when it is scaring the pants off you. The archipelago is divided into distinct biomes, each with its own unique fish, hidden secrets, and terrified residents. As you complete quests for the locals—fetching specific fish, finding lost items, or hunting down dangerous aberrations—you unlock new parts of the map and new abilities for your boat. The overarching narrative is mysterious and vague in a way that works perfectly for the genre. You do not need a massive lore dump to understand that something went terribly wrong in this place a long time ago; the environment tells the story brilliantly through ruined ships, mutated wildlife, and the paranoid ramblings of the islanders.

By the time you reach the late game, your little dinghy has been transformed into a high-tech seafaring vessel, but the waters feel just as dangerous, if not more so. Dredge is an absolute masterclass in taking familiar gaming mechanics and twisting them into something completely unique. It respects your time as a player, offering a tight, well-paced experience that never feels like it is padding its runtime. Whether you are happily organizing your latest haul in the warm glow of the daytime sun or frantically paddling for your life through a foggy nightmare, the game constantly keeps you engaged. If you have even a passing interest in fishing games, survival mechanics, or Lovecraftian horror, you owe it to yourself to drop a line into Dredge. Just do not forget to head back to port before dark.