Still in your library
Balatro, the poker game that resembles nothing else
- Critic score
- 90
- Player rating
- 4.6/5
- Main story
- 7.7 h
- Genre
- Strategy, Casual
- Given away in
- May 2025
Given to Essential subscribers in May 2025, Balatro is the kind of game you claim out of habit and forget in your library. That is a mistake: it is one of the highest-rated games ever to pass through PS Plus, and it rests on a single idea.
The idea: play poker hands — pair, three of a kind, straight, flush — to score points, and clear score thresholds that keep rising. No opponent, no bluffing. Just a hand of cards, a number to beat, and the right to discard what does not help.
Everything happens in the Jokers, cards bought between rounds that bend the rules: multiply the score of a suit, count a card twice, earn money for every pair. There are a hundred and fifty of them, and their interactions mean no two runs look alike. A Joker worth nothing becomes the key to a whole run once the right neighbour shows up.
A run lasts half an hour, won or lost, and every newly unlocked card makes you want to start another. It is the roguelike loop in its purest form, without a single page of rules to read first: if you know what a pair is, you know how to play.
The game is the work of a single developer, and it shows in its coherence: a CRT-television aesthetic, a synth soundtrack that loops without ever wearing thin, and an interface that explains everything on hover. Nothing is there for decoration.
The "main story" playtime means little here: it measures a first win. The real game starts afterwards, with alternate decks, difficulty levels and challenges. If you claimed it in spring 2025, it is still in your library. Launch it on a weeknight: it will not give you back before midnight.