Game of the Year 2024: Balatro

Our choice for the overall game of 2024 is the poker roguelike that played its cards right all year. It held them, it felled them, and it skipped straight past the competition—Balatro was the game the PC Gamer team just kept coming back to. For the best of the rest, check out our Game of the Year 2024 hub.

Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: Balatro might be the most unassuming game we've ever given this high honour. At a glance, it looks more like a game that would've come pre-installed with Windows 98 than the best release of 2024. Even in motion, it doesn't look much—just playing cards floating around. Where are the wizards and laserguns?

But you only have to dip one toe into Balatro's murky waters for it to suddenly grab you and yank you down into its bottomless depths. The moment you win your first round, fumbling for whatever poker hands you can put together, you're hooked—and as you explore all the possibilities of its bizarre deck-building, you're drawn in further and further, until you're having inexplicable conversations with people about "ante 0" and "high card runs" and "planet X".

The result is a roguelike that feels like just as much of a tense and thrilling fantasy adventure as Slay the Spire does, despite that modest appearance. And I don't invoke that genre-mate lightly—I think Balatro is the first deckbuilder to really trouble Slay the Spire's crown, and the legion of imitators it's already spawned are testament to its rightful place in the PC gaming canon. The fact that something so rich and compelling comes to us from a solo developer, relying on slow-build word-of-mouth rather than a huge marketing budget, is yet another reminder that our beloved platform is still the home of indie innovation, not just blockbuster thrills.

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: People talk a lot about Balatro's big numbers, and rightly so, but it's the vibe of the thing that got its hooks into me long before I'd achieved a score high enough to write home about. The swimmy CRT effects, the otherworldly Dorf on Golf soundtrack, the faintly sinister figure of Jimbo the joker and the weird bits of unreality creeping in at the edges in the form of tarot and planet cards: the whole thing feels like a game someone found in a Goosebumps episode. It's a cursed and strange relic from another dimension, and the best game that came out this year.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: If that freaking jester laughs at me on more time after beefing it in the early game, I swear I'll start my own personal war on clowns. In other words, I've been feeling exactly the kind of way a good roguelike aims for.

Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware: This game has taken over any free time I thought I had. About to go to bed? No, two hours of Balatro on a flush run that's oh-so-close to greatness, only to be scuppered by a mega-big blind at the final hour. I'm yet to crack the ceiling for high scores like some on the team but I'm having a wail of a time nonetheless.

This is the perfect game for a handheld gaming PC—that's how I'm getting my hours in. I can turn my handheld down to power saving mode and get nearly three hours of Balatro in—I'll never be bored on a long trip ever again.

The best bit is the balance. There's an opportunity for a winning strategy whatever cards you're dealt. Sure, some might feel doomed from the start, but doubling down on a single high card can return big numbers. Big Numbers!

Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: Balatro is also as wide as it is deep, letting you easily set your own definition of what success actually looks like. For some, the pleasure is in mastering the escalating difficulty of a high-stakes run. Successfully completing Gold Stake on each deck is a monumental challenge of game knowledge and build flexibility—truly demonstrating your mastery of Balatro's jokers and their many effects.

That's… fine, if you're into that sort of thing. For me, the joy of Balatro is in the Big Number play. You're most likely to find me on Ghost Deck, on the easiest difficulty, aggressively thinning my deck in order to engineer some absurd build designed to multiply my multiplier as many times as possible. My best unseeded score to date is 4.681e30, or four nonillion, six hundred eighty-one octillion. The sheer beauty as a stacked lineup of retrigger jokers causes a flush five full of red sealed, glass polychrome kings to proc again and again and again and again—Balatro's sophisticated audio design spiking the sense of triumph to feverish levels. It's an endorphin rush that few other games can match. A buzz that I'll keep chasing, continually looking to refine and improve in search of the ultimate, perfect run. Maybe next time I'll finally land the legendary joker Triboulet. Then things will really kick off.

Even if you're not experimenting at the very limits of Balatro science, there's something here for you. It's a game that's spread quite organically across the PC Gamer team—our excited discussions of builds and fun interactions prompting others to try it. More than a few times this year, someone has messaged me to say, "OK, I tried it, I get it." And that's the beauty. You can spend hundreds of hours mastering this thing. But it'll only take a few hands to get it.