A good roguelike is like good coffee. It should be bold, unique, and satisfying. Both are best enjoyed in copious sips, and if you have enough of either, you’ll want more.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Balatro is the best deckbuilding roguelike since Slay the Spire, which is the most vaunted example of the genre. Balatro’s gameplay loop is compellingly simple: make poker hands from a standard deck of playing cards worth an increasing number of chips.

Sounds simple, right? Except you can add or delete cards from your deck, collect Jokers that have multiplying and stacking effects, upgrade specific poker hands using Planet cards, and more. Stack the deck with Hearts to increase your chances of a sweet Flush, or fill your deck with Jacks in combination with a joker that rewards you for playing face cards. Do both. And a dozen other things, and then try something different. There’s no end to the combinations you can conjure to keep adding to those all-important red and blue numbers that calculate your chip total, and if you’re like me, you’ll just keep coming back. The game’s subtle soundscape and psychedelic visuals are icing on the cake.

That Balatro is able to take something as simple as a deck of playing cards and turn it into a game with such scope, appeal, and replayability would be an accomplishment in itself. But there’s also what Balatro *could have been*. It could have been a ruthlessly addictive, pay-to-advance nightmare mobile game, and it would have been savagely good in that role. In other words, with playing cards as the star attraction, it *could have been* what it appears to be from afar (and apparently to the South Korean government): gambling. That the developer decided to make it a single price roguelike for PC shows either an inherent integrity or a missed opportunity for profit that makes me as grateful as I am impressed.

Balatro is about as close to a perfect game as they get in these tortured days of late capitalism.