Balatro Pt. 3: Aesthetics/Storytelling & Conclusion
Balatro's lore has taken on a life of its own, bringing its vibe to unforeseen (and unhinged) heights.
It would be lazy to say that Balatro is devoid of anything other than its (albeit fantastic) gameplay loop. But it would also be disingenuous to make a case for it being an aesthetic masterpiece that weaves a timeless tale. So, I’m going to cheat a little bit in this first chapter and talk about the second and third Pillars in tandem.
There is a very clear artistic direction here, and I love so many of the choices developer and artist LocalThunk makes. The overall vibe of the game is trippy and intergalactic, punctuated by a fantastically catchy synthwave score that produces a hypnotic effect that causes time to seemingly slip away while you’re playing. There’s a witchy, spooky feel to the cards themselves, with references to the occult in treating tarot cards as consumables throughout your run and mind-warping spectral cards usually forcing you to make some sort of sacrifice to achieve a larger benefit (e.g., destroying one random card to get four enhanced ones). And this is all contrasted with the kind of cute and nostalgic pixel artwork present in all aspects of the presentation. The dissonant tones oddly work together to give Balatro an aesthetic all its own.
I don’t know that it counts as “storytelling,” per se, but Balatro has gained a sort of cult following online, and the “story” of the game has really come from the reputation its rabid fanbase has given it. Part of this comes from the fact that it is an “outsider” in the discussion of the top games of 2024, despite the fact it just recently surpassed 5 million purchases/downloads across all platforms. Another key is that the game is ripe for talking shop. With nearly endless strategies for how to play through any given run1, there’s an entire online ecosystem of people sharing tips or strategies others can deploy to improve their completed run percentage.
But where the real “story” has come from is the community of meme-making and -sharing about and around the game. I first started seeing this groundswell of support in November 2024 (when The Game Awards announced its nominees) when users on a number of forums — including X (the everything app, it’s all happening on X) — were spamming comment sections of posts indirectly related to the game with the super-zoomed in profile picture of Jimbo the joker.2 Admittedly, this bit is what inspired me to finally pony up my 10 bucks and check out the game. Then, things really went crazy when Ben Starr (voice actor of Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy XVI, and niche internet celebrity and provocateur) dawned the garb and face paint of Jimbo in December to shoot a fairly disturbing live-action commercial — which centered around him fellating a banana3 — promoting a new wave of jokers coming to the game.4 Quickly, the comment sections that were once filled with animated Jimbos were now overrun by the still of Starr mirroring the same shit-eating grin and thousand-yard stare.
Balatro, the discourse around it, and its fandom never fail to be on brand with the quirky, off-beat, outsider aesthetic LocalThunk has cultivated since the game launched on Steam a year ago. On its own, the look and feel of Balatro elevates it beyond most other deck-building games you can find on the market. But its ability to cultivate and mobilize a community of players was how I knew this game was truly special.
Conclusion
Balatro has quickly found a place among my all-time favorite games, and I’ll likely be playing it for years to come. It is not, however, immersive — declaring it so wouldn’t be fair to the other titles I’ll label as such in the coming chapters. And there are a few reasons why I chose to talk about this game first in a collection that will largely be focused on high-budget, action-adventure games:
It shows that a game being great and being immersive aren’t mutually exclusive — that while a game can be technically lacking (whether because of a smaller budget, studio, etc.), it can still be worthy of critical acclaim.
That achieving an immersive experience requires more than a fun and addictive gameplay loop — it takes investment in characters and the events taking place in the game, accompanied by dynamic sounds and visuals that are cleverly used to emphasize critical gameplay and storytelling moments.
All of this is to say that I’ve been writing for the last four hours and kind of have an itch to get back to playing Balatro.
Pretty sure this time I’ll finally be able to beat the Black Stake with my Green Deck … definitely if I can get the Baseball Card and start loading up on complementary uncommon jokers for stacked 1.5X multipliers. Just need to get lucky and hit plenty of Saturn and Jupiter cards … maybe I can buy the Telescope voucher …
Click here to read about the next game in this series, 2022 Game of the Year It Takes Two!
Or however many five-card (or more or less) combinations you can make out of the base game’s 150 jokers.
So much so that you’d have to scroll past 100 or so of these images if you clicked on any post related to The Game Awards.
A reference to maybe the most powerful card in the game, Cavendish, a joker that 3Xs your multiplier on every hand, with the almost comical nerfing of a 1-in-1,000 risk that it will be destroyed after each round (you’ll probably play 15-20 rounds if you finish a run). This card in particular has taken on a meme life of its own.
Looking back, the outtakes released a couple weeks later were where the real nightmare fuel came from.