Balatro creator admits his attempt to 100% his own roguelike game before the mobile port was doomed, and now he has "some words for John Balatro"
Oct. 28, 2024I, too, have words for John Balatro
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If you thought making a game would make clearing it a breeze, you might want to think again. Balatro creator LocalThunk has been trying to 100% the poker-themed roguelike deck-builder, and, well, it’s proving a challenge.
“Been trying to 100% Balatro for the first time since mobile launched, and holy shit, I have some words for John Balatro,” he says onTwitter, sounding like the rest of us.
I get it. One of the challenges you need to complete to get that coveted accomplishment is to unlock all 15 decks currently on offer. Some are easier to do than others, though they share similarities. For example, you’ll need to discover 20 items to get the Blue deck, while the Erratic deck, on the other end of the difficulty spectrum, requires you to win a run on the Orange Stake difficulty. Essentially, play the game and win under certain conditions.
Now, you can unlock all of the decks by clicking on your profile, but it ain’t that easy – doing so disables achievements on that profile until you reset it. Regardless, if there’s any lesson here, it’s that you don’t need to worry if that Balatro achievement milestone is beyond your reach – even LocalThunk is struggling.
Thankfully, the game itself is not struggling. Thedeveloper may have had low expectations for it- as his PC setup alludes to - but theroguelike took barely one month to sell 1 million copies.We also found out earlier this month that players across all platforms have racked up11,000 years of playtime.This has also led to some rather neat collaborationswith the likes of Stardew Valley and Cyberpunk 2077.
Not that any of that has helped LocalThunk 100% his game.
Before Balatro took over the world, the roguelike’s creator considered naming it Fool’s Gambit - “obviously not a great name,” but it had a killer main menu.
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Iain joins the GamesRadar team as Deputy News Editor following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When not helping Ali run the news team, he can be found digging into communities for stories – the sillier the better. When he isn’t pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new hat, you’ll find him amassing an army of Pokemon plushies.
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