It has happened again. Steam Next Fest has served me up another Balatro-style gambling-inspired roguelike that has eaten away at my entire week and severely curtailed the number of other demos I might have played. It's a pattern that has repeated across the last three major demo drops, and which I do not see myself breaking any time soon.
This time around, the main offender is Raccoin. Like Balatro, it's a game that uses a vaguely gambling-shaped framework to encourage you to create builds capable of scoring ever-increasing numbers of points. Here, the 'gambling' is one of those coin-pusher arcade machines. Instead of enhanced cards, you can purchase special coins with different effects; some are sticky, adhering to nearby tokens to ensure they all fall into the prize bin together; others are explosive, blasting coins towards the precipice instead; plenty more augment the value of coins they touch, offering more points once you claim them.
Those arcade machines are all about timing, and Raccoin plays off that by offering a combo meter. Each dropped coin refreshes the timer, building a score multiplier and enhancing the prize you get when the meter eventually runs out. Get really lucky, your payout will be a towering stack of hundreds of coins or a glut of power-ups that throw the entire cabinet into chaos as multipliers stack atop multipliers and your score runs up before you're even entirely aware of what's happening. At its grandest cascade, Raccoin is a deliberate hyperstimulation simulator that asks you to just sit back and rack up the high score.
The problem with that kind of dopamine dispenser is that it's easy to forget that you're supposed to be aiming for a high score. Raccoin is not an easy game to strategize around, but throw too many coins haphazardly into the machine, and you'll quickly find yourself out of credits, nowhere near the threshold for the next level. Having fallen foul of the game over screen this way a few times too often, I was determined to beat Raccoin's Steam Next Fest demo. And eventually, after far too many hours with the tinkle of falling metal ringing in my ears, I hit the god run, clearing the twelfth and final stage without even realizing I'd done it.
In isolation, that would probably be ok, but I've realized it's part of a pattern of reckless roguelike behavior that's repeated over the last few iterations of Steam Next Fest. This time it was Raccoin, with a limited showing from a Chess-like twist on the Balatro formula called Gambonanza. Last time, it was Slots & Daggers, which I was so determined to beat that I deliberately grinded for the strongest power-up right from the start of the game. Before that, it was CloverPit, which enveloped me in its gritty slot machine-fueled Saw trap.
Balatro's influence on those three games is clear, and in successive Next Fests, I pushed both their demos and my sanity to their limits in my attempts to beat them. And I'm not alone - October 2025's Fest also saw Dice a Million and Ballionaire get their hooks into my colleagues. All of them are marinated in Balatro's secret sauce, each with their own RNG-filled starting point that ensures they feel instantly familiar but never stale. That winning formula, and the commercial success that tends to accompany it, means that Steam Next Fest's close relationship with Balatro-likes isn't likely to come to an end anytime soon - and that means that every four months or so, I'm going to lose another week of my life to making sure I beat my latest roguelike obsession before its demo goes away.
Raccoin isn't the only roguelike that's absorbing us - this cute Spore-like game is one of the biggest in Steam Next Fest, with 99% positive reviews.
