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Balatro may have ruined several lives last year due to it being seemingly impossible to put down, but even with the millions of hours that would've been played over the 5 million copies sold, it turns out that less than 1% of players have conquered it's biggest challenge – the Platinum trophy on the PlayStation version. But among the 0.2% who have is the lead designer of the PS4 and PS5, Mark Cerny.
Cerny, who was instrumental in bringing Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and – most importantly – Knack to the world, posted his achievement on Twitter, saying "After seven months and hundreds of hours, proud to join the 0.1% of players that have achieved Platinum on Balatro! Kudos to LocalThunk for the incredibly deep gameplay."
Now, I love Balatro, but have you actually seen what you need to do to get the Platinum in the game? There are some pretty standard trophies like "win a run" as well as ones for higher difficulties, with some action-based ones like growing your deck to 80 cards, or winning runs with certain detriments (like being unable to reroll the shop or winning in 12 rounds). These are fine, for the most part, but it's when you get to the end of that trophy list that things get cruel.
Not only did Cerny have to complete all 20 challenge runs (including a particularly devious Jokerless run), but also 100% completed the collection and used all 15 decks to complete the Gold Stake (the highest difficulty), which requires beating the seven previous stakes to unlock in the first place.
But it's the game's final challenge that takes it from a bit of a grind to the absolute worst. The "Completionist++" trophy requires you to get a gold sticker on every single Joker card in the game. Translation: You need to beat the game on the highest difficulty while having that specific Joker card in play. Considering there's a random chance of finding a given Joker, limited Joker slots, and the reasonable number of 150 Jokers to do this challenge with, that grind soon becomes unbearable for anyone but the most dedicated of Balatro players.
Let's just hope Cerny did all of that in his free time, otherwise the PS6 is probably going to take another 10 years to release.
This dev's first game, a surreal trip based on a YouTube animated series, came out 3 days after Schedule 1 and is right on its heels for best-reviewed Steam release of the year.
