Balatro solo dev LocalThunk has given a bit more insight into the inspirations behind his hit "poker roguelike," which he says, it could be argued, is "technically a solitaire game."
In the first post on LocalThunk's newly created blog, he explains that solitaire – specifically, its most common variant, Klondike – would be "right in the middle" of a Balatro vision board, had he actually made one. It's arguably "the most important" inspiration behind the game, the dev adds, noting that he wanted Balatro to "bring the old feeling of solitaire into a game with modern design bells and whistles, creating something new and yet familiar."
To LocalThunk, classic solitaire games "exist at the peak of game culture," since they're so widely accepted and have been played by pretty much everyone, to the point that "they have transcended gaming culture more than even the biggest IPs (like Tetris or Mario)." The fact that solitaire is "almost viewed as a positive pastime more than a game" was something that interested LocalThunk, and seemingly fed into the dev's overall vision of who he imagined playing his game.
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"My fantasy was that I was playing this weird game many years later on a lazy Sunday afternoon; I play a couple of runs, enjoy my time for about an hour, then set it down and continue the rest of my day," he explains. "I wanted it to feel evergreen, comforting, and enjoyable in a very low-stakes way. I think that's one of the reasons why there isn't a player character, health, or classic 'enemies' in the game as well. I wanted this game to be as low stakes as a crossword or a sudoku puzzle while still exercising the problem-solving part of the brain. Essentially I wanted to play Balatro like people play solitaire."
Obviously, there is quite a difference between Balatro and your classic game of solitaire. As LocalThunk points out, his own title includes the likes of challenges and achievements, which were included in order to get players to "explore the design of the game" and give them a "checklist to work through if they so choose." Not only that, but the idea of playing for a while and continuing the rest of your day as he envisioned might have underestimated how engrossing Balatro would be – there's a reason he apologized for the productivity of players worldwide when the mobile port was announced.
With LocalThunk himself still playing Balatro "almost daily" a year on from its launch, he says, "I feel like I just might have accomplished the task of recreating the feeling of playing solitaire for myself." However, with that being said, "seeing the discourse around my game has me fairly convinced that this is decidedly not how the average player has been interacting with my game." Even so, he's "thrilled" that players are enjoying it, but believes that "only time will tell" if he accomplished creating that "new and yet familiar" feeling he was aiming for.
For more games like Balatro, be sure to check out our roundup of the best roguelikes you can play right now.
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