I don't like poker, but I love Baratro. It's pretty astounding that someone with almost no experience whatsoever with their own game can create such a magnum opus.

A few weeks after its release, nearly everyone on the PC Gamer team has spent an embarrassing amount of time with the game. My interest was almost evenly split between "Balatro" and "Helldivers 2," the latter of which completely shook up the live-service shooter landscape. [Fortunately, "Balatro" has been a success in proportion to how well it has done. In a short period of time, the game sold over 500,000 copies and has now doubled that number to an astounding one million, according to the game's official Twitter page. Personally, I am glad that some puzzling issues regarding age ratings have not slowed the game down. [The typical roguelike deckbuilder leans more toward the RPG genre, throwing enemies and bosses at you and making you manage your HP and resources. Balatro, by contrast, is simply tasked with making his numbers as high as possible. There are minimum scores that must be achieved and "boss blinds" that interfere with your strategy, but otherwise it is devilishly simple.

Balatro is a strong, distilled moonshine as opposed to the colorful cocktail of three Slay the Spire umbrellas. The latter is delicious, but the former will have you saying, "Wait, I've been logged into this game for 30 hours already?" will confuse you to the tune of.

If you are anything like me, you may have been put off by the game's poker-adjacent aesthetic. My problem with real card games that use traditional decks is how much memorization is required. Fortunately, there is very little card counting in Balatro, and thanks to a menu that you can open at any time to learn the difference between a flush and a straight, you don't need to know the rules of poker to get hooked.

What Balatro does so well is that it allows you to stack unique modifiers on top of each other while breaking the typical rules of poker in your lap. After the first three rounds, there are no "best hands" in Baratolo, only hands that are actually constructed. Unless you are me, the universe conspires against you. I wanted four or ten.