WP3: Blog Post, WP4: Game Review
Every once in a while, a wacky new indie game takes the world by storm. In 2015, there was Undertale. In 2020, there was Among Us. This year, there was Balatro, which sold a million copies in just one month, according to the game's solo developer. Surely Balatro owes much of that success to its catchy premise: poker, but you can bend the rules. Although the game has no connection to real-life money, it certainly captures some of the rush of gambling. Whenever I watch the game count up my points, it really does hit a sweet spot somewhere deep in my monkey brain. Yet, I think the game's true appeal taps into a human instinct even more primordial than gambling: storytelling.
Let's start with the basics. Balatro is mostly like poker. You draw a hand of playing cards, which you can selectively discard. Your goal is to form the best possible poker hand (pairs, full houses, straights, and so on) so that you can earn points. Balatro is also a little like solitaire. Instead of facing off against other people, you're just trying to keep up with an ever-rising point threshold. In the first round, you need to score 300 points. Next round, it's 450. Then, 600. If you can't score enough points, then you lose.
Of course, the game has a twist: jokers. These special cards change the very rules of the game in a huge range of different ways. One joker makes face cards score more points. Another rewards you for playing flushes. Another lets you permanently remove cards from your deck. The game features over 150 different jokers, and each opens up a whole universe of strategic possibilities. Critically, the game doesn't let you pick whatever jokers you want. Instead, it shows you a few jokers after each round, which you can choose to buy with your limited money. So, you just have to pick from the options you've got and score enough points to stay alive.
I'll tell you about the first time Balatro really clicked with me. Our story begins when I ran into a joker that gave more points for each two-pair that I played. Two-pair is a relatively common hand, so I decided this joker would be useful, and I bought it. As I proceeded, I played only two-pair, ignoring opportunities for the conventionally better straights and flushes. Over time, my two-pair got better and better. I managed to beat the 1,000 point round. Then the 4,000 point round.
Despite my short-term success, I knew I still needed at least one more joker to really boost my scoring. Then, I found it: a joker that gave extra points to hands with exactly four cards. Because of my reliance on two-pair, this normally useless joker was like gold. With the combined power of my two jokers, I really found my stride. 10,000 points. 20,000 points. I bought jokers which helped me draw my two-pair every single hand. 50,000 points. Eventually, I beat the final round of the game: 100,000 points.
It's hard to ignore the visceral joy that Balatro evokes as you rack up ridiculous point totals. The game takes its time counting up your points, making sparkly noises and showing flashy animations. This is made all the more satisfying by the skill it requires to devise a winning strategy. The game requires a solid knowledge of the rules and a keen eye for synergies between jokers. A new player might stumble into success 10% of the time, but a skilled player can pull out a win every time. Even better, the game encourages you to play over and over again through its huge variety of difficulty modes and extra challenges.
Yet, Balatro isn't just for strategy-game fanatics; I think its appeal goes far deeper. To me, Balatro is a game that creates great stories. When I bring up story, you probably think of something like The Last of Us, which has a script, characters, plot points, and cutscenes. Balatro has none of this – it's just a bizarre poker game taking place who-knows-where. Instead, Balatro deals with a less obvious type of story: the emergent story. These are the stories that the player creates when they play the game. They aren't written in advance by the game developer, but rather they emerge from gameplay.
In fact, you've already read an emergent story in this very review. My two-pair extravaganza was precisely an emergent story. That story might not punch quite as hard as The Last of Us, but I can assure you it was riveting in the moment. Emergent stories work so well because they directly involve the player. I wasn't just watching the story play out; I was in direct control of every choice, and I was responsible for every consequence. If I had made different choices – maybe going for straights instead of two-pairs – the story would've been totally different. Perhaps I would've lost, or perhaps I would've won even more spectacularly. Either way, that wasn't the story I chose.
Balatro's emergent stories are particularly special because the game forgoes the nigh universal convention of checkpoints. When you lose, Balatro sends you all the way back to the beginning. A game of Balatro can last more than an hour, so it can really hurt to lose all that progress to a dumb mistake. However, this made my emergent stories ever more gripping – because defeat is so punishing, victory is even more sweet.
Balatro's lack of checkpoints has a more foundational impact on its emergent stories. Checkpoints reflect a particular game design philosophy: in all circumstances, regardless of the player's past actions, they should still be able to succeed. When you fail, most games let you retry from a recent checkpoint. When you run out of bullets, most games magically give you more. When you become injured, they miraculously restore your health points. Although these mechanics make games far less frustrating, they also lessen the impact of your choices. Why does it matter if you waste your bullets when you know the game will always give you more?
Because Balatro forgoes checkpoints (and the associated safety nets), its emergent stories are uniquely long and sophisticated. Let's get a little theoretical for a moment. Most stories rely on a chain of events: one plot point leads to the next until the story ends. Balatro capitalizes on that by making all of your choices have crucial impacts over a long timespan. If you run out of money, then you'll eventually lose. If you can't come up with a powerful strategy, you'll inevitably fail to meet the point thresholds. Each round has impacts that feed into the next, building up a chain of events that cause and react to one another. You may make a choice that has obvious short-term impacts, but only later do you see it has long-term impacts, too. In this way, Balatro builds up plots that are notably lengthy and interconnected.
Although Balatro affords the player tons of choice, it nonetheless keeps a tight hold on the structure of its emergent stories. Every game of Balatro is broken into 24 rounds, each with a higher point total than the last. Because you're always trying to keep up with the rapidly increasing point requirements, the game keeps the pressure high and makes every moment feel important. Plus, every third round is an especially hard "boss" with a special power (like disabling one suit or giving fewer discards). These force you to get extra crafty, creating moments of even greater tension and release. Overall, a game of Balatro resembles a typical western plot structure – there's a persistent rise in tension adorned with many smaller peaks and valleys. Because of that structure, Balatro's emergent stories are constantly engaging.
So, Balatro's emergent stories are thoroughly reactive and persistently tense. However, for a story to be really great, it also needs to be meaningful. So, what do Balatro's stories mean? What does the game have to say?
When I beat Balatro playing only two-pair, it was because I made a connection: I saw two jokers that benefitted from one another, and I built my whole strategy around them. As I replayed the game over and over again, winning always required finding an exciting strategy just like this. The creativity that Balatro affords is the mark of a great strategy game, but it also infuses the game's emergent stories with meaning. In all of the stories where I lost, it was because I failed to see a clever path forward. And, in the stories where I won, it was because I recognized some detail about the game's rules that could be exploited. In either case, these stories are about ingenuity; the game tells us that problems are solved by those with an eye for invention. If you haven't played Balatro yet, I strongly encourage you to pick it up and make some emergent stories of your own.
Part 2
On the surface, my review exists within the critical discourse around Balatro. In this area, critics have nearly unanimously agreed that Balatro is a huge achievement. On the review aggregator Metacritic, the game currently sits at 90%, signifying "Universal Acclaim". Considering that I love the game myself, I align very closely with these critics. That being said, I chose not to directly engage with the work of other critics, since I wanted my review to entirely reflect my own experiences and opinions. As a result, my review looks at Balatro through the unexpected lens of emergent story.
Although I'm probably the first to talk about Balatro in terms of emergent story, I'm definitely not the first to use that concept in a more general sense. In his book Extra Lives, Tom Bissell discusses this concept, although he refers to it as "ludonarrative". The often-discussed talking point of "ludonarrative dissonance", first coined by Clint Hocking, revolves around that same notion. The YouTube essayist Adam Millard uses the term "emergent narrative" to refer to exactly the same thing. In WP3, I selected "emergent story" as my own term. In that piece, I synthesized the opinions of these different game critics into a clearer framework. Then, I demonstrated the usefulness of that framework through an analysis of four games. So, when I discuss emergent story in WP4, I'm really pulling from my own WP3, which is based on ideas from many different game critics.
In the latter part of my Balatro review, I discuss the meaning of Balatro's emergent stories. This is primarily inspired by Jonathan Blow, who uses the phrase "dynamical meaning" to refer to the message communicated by a game's systemic elements. The conclusion of my Balatro review essentially looks at the game through the lens of dynamical meaning. However, I use my own terminology instead of Blow's. Although my review is inspired by Blow, I'm certain that he would disagree with my larger point. In a 2008 talk, he claims that games don't tell effective stories at all. He believes that gameplay is simply too unstructured to tell truly effective stories. I push back against that perspective in my review by describing how effortlessly Balatro controls the structure of its emergent stories.
In WP3, all of these high-minded game design concepts were in the foreground – the explicit goal of the blog post was to persuade game designers to create more emergent stories. In WP4, my primary goal is much simpler: I want to persuade a general gaming audience that Balatro is excellent, and that they should play it. Crucially, I make that point through the lens of my work in WP3. I argue that Balatro is great precisely because it tells uniquely potent emergent stories. So, emergent stories aren't exactly the point of WP4; they're just a means to an end. That being said, I hope my review has the side-effect of exposing a broader audience to the idea of emergent story. I try to demonstrate why emergent stories can be so powerful, and I hope that readers can use that knowledge to better understand the games they play.