Took me 5 hours from start to finish to beat with all achievements, if that's your thing. A nice tight game for a solid purchase price to enjoy and evening with.

Is this Skate 3? No.
Is it going to be as good as Skate 3? Probably not, no.

Am I having fun with this? Yes.
Do I keep coming back to play this in my free time? Yes.

That's all I can ask out of a game right now. It's great for just vibing out in.

It's a nice little fun game. It scratches the itch that I was having of wanting to play a Marble Blast type game. It's nothing revolutionary, but it's nice, cheap, and well put together. Bonus points if you catch it while it's on sale.

BUY THIS BEFORE IT GETS PULLED IT'S SO WORTH IT

Even though it's only February, Balatro may very well be my personal GOTY. At current time of this review, I still haven't passed my playtime for the demo version that was out before release.

If you're a fan of roguelike games this is a must purchase. Balatro's biggest strength is that you can genuinely create whatever build you want when you start a run. You don't, (alright, very rarely) get forced into building your deck in a specific way.

The basic concept is you play a poker hand and get scored based on the difficulty of the hand played, with any additional scoring augmentations that you may have added. Jokers are the biggest influencers of your total score, but you also have the ability to both level up each individual poker hand and add/remove cards to your deck. Did I also mention that each individual playing card can be augmented in three different ways? I know I didn't, but now I did.

What keeps me addicted to this game is the pure distillation of making your score as big as possible in whatever creative way you can think of. It's set up in such a brilliant way to give you the sandbox and tools to have fun relaxing and chasing that high score.

Edit: I wrote this back in February and this is still my 2024 Game of the Year.

Can't say I recommend the game after the recent updates. Before the 2.0 update it was a very user friendly game, but since the update a lot of features have been changed and reduced in order to make a subscription model to this game more appealing.

I'm not subscribing to a game that I've previously bought. I just want to relax during my free time. I'm too old for all of these people thinking they can just hollow out what was there and put it behind a paywall. Uninstall and move on.

Got this game as part of a Humble Bundle Puzzle pack. A very nice game that can be completed in just one session if you have a little over 2 hours to spare (base game plus all additional content). It's beautiful to look at, has wonderful sound design, and is a very enjoyable and calm experience.

The puzzles aren't hard, there were a couple that took me a little bit to figure out, but it's very solvable and isn't something that will keep inexperienced puzzle solvers out. I feel happy and energized upon completion.

Brilliant little roguelike. Great for just picking up and losing yourself in its world. I'm personally a fan of nothing getting explained as it keeps it mysterious. I definitely recommend it.