I can already feel how much sleep I’m about to lose when Balatro becomes one of the free monthly games for PlayStation Plus in May. The 2024 GOTY contender and viral high score chase sensation is only a year old and about to win over a whole new group of converts to its Joker-worshipping cult.
Balatro will become free to download on PlayStation 4 and 5 for paying PS Plus subscribers starting May 6. Ark: Survival Ascended, the remaster of the long-running sci-fi dino survival sim, is also arriving that day along with the excellent boomer-shooter-inspired FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. A decent month for base level PS Plus members indeed (subscribers have until May 5 to download the current batch of games including RoboCop: Rogue City).
For anyone unfamiliar with Balatro, the deck-building roguelike has you trying to reach certain point thresholds by making poker hands. Simple enough, except a bunch of ever-shifting Joker modifiers, multipliers, and other twists augment your scoring capability. You purchase new cards or upgrades between rounds in order to get a deck that delivers scores high enough to beat a revolving circus of mini-bosses. It’s a remix of poker that borrows from Diablo, Slay the Spire, and more to craft a “one more turn” machine that’s hard to dislodge from.
I poured dozens of hours into the PC version when it launched on Steam in February 2024, and later dabbled a bit with the mobile version which is particularly insidious in how it makes random pockets of time throughout the day completely disappear. Based on that you’d probably think I wouldn’t be downloading the PS Plus version, and I wish you were right. I can already hear the siren call of that Platinum trophy though. Balatro is a perfect right-before-bed challenge for streaming on the PS Portal or smartphone, at least until “right before bed” turns into birds chirping outside the window at 4:00 a.m.
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