Balatro Review – One More Blind
Poker has endured as a popular and immensely enjoyable card game because of how malleable it is. The purest form of poker is predominantly played in your hand, with you deciding on cards to discard and redraw in the hopes of creating a better hand than your opponents. Texas Hold’Em, by far the most popular variation on poker, eschews these rules by giving all players five shared cards on the table, and two cards in their hand to try and outwit other players with. A small change like this has a dramatic impact on how the game ultimately plays out, inviting the assumption that other small tweaks might have similar effects. Balatro operates directly in this space. It creates distinct scenarios through both deck building and randomization that force you to think about poker hands differently during short, captivating runs in its roguelite structure. It injects new life into the fundamental rules of poker without requiring any previous knowledge of the game, feeling deftly balanced for both newcomers and experts of the card game alike.
Balatro is deceptively straightforward. Each round you play features a blind, which here is a total score you need to beat in order to progress. Each card has its own chip value, while different poker hands add on multipliers to the total score you hand tallies to. Play better hands with better cards, and you’ll progress from the small blind to the big blind and ultimately a boss blind before the ante is raised and you’re challenged to repeat the process with more challenging totals to topple. You’re limited to a certain number of hands you can play during each round, as well as a limited amount of discard opportunities that let you toss away cards you don’t want to use. A handy glossary makes the action approachable even if you’re unfamiliar with the basics of poker, and the means to progress through each round aren’t fundamentally rooted in a deep understanding of the odd differences between each hand.
Knowing the odds of different poker hands and why you might want to pursue simple straights and flushes over the combination of the two will probably help initially in earlier rounds, but as you go on, Balatro exposes its random roguelite elements to great effect. Joker cards are Balatro’s big modifiers, offering a suite of effects that can quickly define a build that will ultimately influence the theme of your run. The combination of a joker that adds multipliers for playing Club cards with another that rewards the use of only face cards (Kings, Queens, and Jacks) can turn otherwise simple flushes or straights into incredibly high-scoring hands–a strategy you may need to progress through more challenging blinds. Other jokers can be delightfully chaotic, like one that randomizes its multiplier each time you play a hand or another that consumes other joker cards and adds their value to its overall multiplier. The game quickly starts encouraging you to strategize around the jokers that you’re given access to (each new one you purchase gets added to the pool of potential reappearances) and adjusting the hands you play around them in order to progress, making each run feel distinct in spite of the simple mechanics underpinning them.
A shop that’s available between rounds stocks jokers for you to purchase with money you earn based on your performance during each blind. In addition to jokers, there are a variety of different card types that can have an equally important impact on your run. Arcana cards are consumables that you can use for a variety of effects, many of which alter the nature of cards in your deck. Some might swap the house that a card belongs to or promote a card up a rank. Others can turn cards into different materials entirely. Glass cards provide higher multipliers when played but have a chance to shatter permanently, while steel cards have their rank and suit stripped but provide chip and multiplier bonuses. These are just a handful of examples, and knowing when to use certain Arcana cards is as important as knowing which to discard depending on the balance you’ve formed with your inventory of jokers.
Planet cards provide more holistic changes, increasing the rank of particular poker hands which provide more chip and multiplier bonuses when you play them. Like Arcana cards, Spectral cards are consumable, but have much greater effects on your deck, sometimes altering numerous cards at a time at the expense of one, as an example. The combination of Arcana and Spectral cards, coupled with the effect of Planet cards, provides a deck-building element to Balatro that is engaging to interact with. It’s far less involved than many other deckbuilder roguelites, especially when you consider that all deck construction is determined by randomization throughout each run, so it’s more a system to complement your growing collection of potential joker pulls rather than the fundamental strategic element throughout each run.
Each ante consists of three rounds: a small blind, a big blind, and a boss blind. The boss blind is the only one where the rules can be twisted and changed, with the modifier exposed at the start of each ante. This gives you the chance to acknowledge and prepare for the boss ahead, but the two blinds and their associated shops sometimes don’t offer the tools for you to adequately change your build if you foresee a big challenge. Some bosses nerf entire suits, which can quickly end runs that depend on that for big scores. One particularly nasty one limits you to just playing a single hand, which has been the death of many of my own runs when appearing in early antes. You can opt to skip blinds (including the cash you might earn and a trip to the shop) in exchange for tokens that can, in some cases, completely change the boss modifier before you reach it) but given that this and, seemingly, the modifiers that bosses are assigned are completely random, it can be frustrating to have an otherwise great run ruined by what seems like rotten luck.
But as much as any roguelite is rooted in random (but carefully calculated) luck, you can have runs where you feel virtually unstoppable. Each element, from jokers to Planet cards, has a substantial impact on both how you approach each new round and the scores you’re able to obtain with single hands. They also force you to vary the way to play each run, as simply sticking to the same traditional poker hands will very quickly prevent you from reaching higher antes. A run where you focused on transforming all your cards into hearts and using jokers that rewarded the use of them could be followed by one where the emphasis is instead on playing just three cards with each hand, with a joker and Planet card both synergizing with that. Throw in a joker that allows you to complete straights with just four cards and another that lets you skip missing cards to create one and you’ve got a whole other avenue to try and beat the game’s finale, the eighth ante. It is immensely satisfying to watch your score soar upwards as multiplier upon multiplier is added to each of your hands, with the scoreboard being set ablaze when you’ve conjured up a particularly gigantic one. But ultimately the variety keeps each of Balatro’s runs surprisingly fresh given the simplicity of its underlying mechanics, urging you to take on another run immediately after you’ve completed one.
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Overall progression doesn’t end once you’ve beaten the game’s eighth ante either. Instead, you can continue onwards through an endless run and see just how far you can get, with each new ante getting exponentially more challenging to pass. As you unlock jokers, pass certain milestones, and use particular cards, you’ll unlock additional decks that provide new starting parameters to experiment with. Some might be as simple as increasing the number of hands of discards at your disposal, while others activate abilities at the start of each run to help you predetermine what direction you can take it. Once you’ve completed Balatro with five different decks, a challenge tab unlocks that provides even more reasons to continue running through it. All of this is to say that Balatro provides enough reasons to stick with it for hours on end even after clearing it, making it a great game to both be continuously engaged with and one that you can return to periodically for a long time to come.
Balatro ticks all the boxes for a roguelite that creates a feedback loop that’s difficult to draw yourself away from. Its fundamentals are incredibly easy to understand, even if you’re unfamiliar with poker, but the ways in which it works within the game’s boundaries (and often breaks free from them) injects a level of depth to each hand to play that’s both challenging and rewarding to continually engage with. It’s a game that will melt away time as you hit play on one run after the next, with each defeat never stinging long enough to dissuade the possibility of victory on the next. While a handful of boss antes annoyingly end runs prematurely, they’re nowhere near detrimental enough to take away from the immensely satisfying balance that Balatro strikes in every other aspect.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review – One In A Hundred
In the years since the explosion of game crowdfunding, a stigma has emerged surrounding these titles. Yes, there have been plenty of games that enjoyed great success after their crowdfunding campaigns, but more people remember the high-profile flops: games with big names and ambitious promises attached that, for a variety of reasons, betrayed the high hopes fans held for them. Many of these were revivals–spiritual or otherwise–of beloved series from ages past. Now we have Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a crowdfunded game designed to carry the torch of the much-beloved Suikoden series from the PS1 and PS2–and, with such a high pedigree attached, there’s understandable trepidation: Will this be a glorious return to form, or another disappointment? Fortunately, for us (and all of the backers), it turned out wonderfully.
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Eiyuden Chronicle begins when a young man named Nowa joins the Eltisweiss Watch, a small militia unit under the command of Countess Perielle of the League of Nations. On a joint mission with a military team from the Galdean Empire, the Watch discovers a powerful, ancient artifact, the Primal Lens, earning everyone involved instant renown. However, it’s not long before squabbling between the Empire and League over the device, along with internal power struggles in the Empire, erupts into an invasion of Eltisweiss and a full-blown war. As the scope of the conflict expands, so does the story: Nowa rebuilds a resistance army in an abandoned castle, Imperial military prodigy Seign struggles with his feelings of obligation, friendship, and loyalty, and a young warrior woman named Marisa finds her clan caught in the middle.
The story doesn’t shy away from its similarities to games in the Suikoden series. In several ways, it outright embraces them: a story that branches into multiple viewpoints, loyalties among friends being tested during war, internal political intrigue, powerful magic runes being a crucial plot device, and, most obviously, the conceit of building a huge band of warriors to take on an even bigger enemy. The story was helmed by Suikoden creator and writer Yoshitaka Murayama (who sadly passed away shortly before the game’s release), and it brims with the warmth, wit, and plot twists that made the early Suikoden titles so engaging and memorable.
Throughout the game, you’ll be on the lookout for more characters to bolster the ranks of the Watch and, eventually, help build a base for the Resistance army. Some characters are easy to find and recruit, but others will require some searching or additional effort: You may have to go back to a town or dungeon from much earlier in the game, locate a rare item, play a minigame, or fend off a vicious foe to get someone to join the crew. Searching for heroes is a lot of fun (and much easier once you get the fast-travel ability), and the reward of seeing your base grow and improve with the efforts of your new comrades is immensely satisfying.
But the characters themselves are often their own reward. Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality. They don’t just fall into the background once their recruitment arc is over, either; they’ll comment on current story events while they’re in your party, chatter as you explore towns, and interact with other characters at the base and elsewhere on your travels. Sometimes they’ll show up to add extra flair when you least expect it, like when they get dragged into judging a cooking competition.
Aside from giving you a good amount of freedom to search for friends when you feel like it, Eiyuden Chronicle’s story progression is similar to the typical JRPG: mostly linear with major setpieces and battles to highlight key story points. You’ll go through the usual dungeons, deserts, tundras, forests, and mines, sometimes needing to solve puzzles to progress. While most of the puzzles are pretty simple, they can sometimes be more obnoxious than intended due to random enemy encounters interrupting things at the worst possible times. Still, the dungeon design is solid and exploration is generally rewarding.
Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality
Combat is also heavily based on the Suikoden games: turn-based, with up to six active party members at a time, plus a seventh support member who can grant passive benefits like stat boosts or money gain. Characters can have both skills based on SP (which regenerates over time) and MP (which needs items to restore), and each be changed based on the runes that character has equipped. Placement is key: Some attacks and skills won’t reach far beyond the front row, while some less-armored characters work better in the back–and there are also skills that target entire rows. One distinct combat element carried over from Suikoden is multi-character team attacks that require two or more characters with some sort of connection to be in the party together, who can then perform a tandem specialty attack.
Not every character in your army is available to fight, but you’re still given a very wide selection of party members to pick from to fight the way you prefer. You’re probably not going to use every single character you recruit in combat, and that’s fine–seeing who you click with and building them up generally works well. And if you do need to bring a character you’ve been neglecting up to snuff, a graduated XP system works to get them to parity with your high-level warriors quickly. A bit of auto-battling and they should be set.
Boss battles are where things get interesting. Many boss fights in the game come with some sort of interactable gimmick that changes the way you approach the battle. These can be objects to hide behind to avoid damage, background objects that cause damage to either you or the opponent based on who gets to it first, or even a treasure lying just beyond a row of foes. Sometimes these gimmicks are really fun and clever, like a boss who gets knocked off-balance when one of the lackeys hoisting them on their backs is felled, leaving it defenseless. Sometimes it’s miserable, like needing to guess which side of the arena the enemy will appear on to hit a book and deal extra damage, missing entirely if you guess wrong. When the gimmicks are good, they make for very fun fights, but when they’re not, you’ll be longing for more straightforward combat. And sometimes the boss is simply a big difficulty spike in general, leaving you in a very bad situation if you come in ill-prepared.
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By far the worst combat experience, however, are the large-scale army battles. These play out like a turn-based strategy game, with your party members commanding armies and moving around a grid, but lack any of the fun and excitement you’ll find in a dedicated strategy-RPG. You spend most of the time just watching things happen, feeling like you have very little control over the proceedings as the armies you moved around, slowly engage the enemy. You’re left hoping they’ll do more damage than the opposition so you can go back to the fun parts of the game instead.
Overall, Eiyuden Chronicle hits the retro-RPG sweet spot nicely. It’s focused on delivering that warm, comforting feeling of a classic JRPG, and even all of the side distractions–the card minigame, the weird Pokemon/Beyblade hybrid top minigame, the raising/racing sim, even commodities trading–don’t distract too much from the game’s prime mission. Add some gorgeously painted and animated spritework and a stellar soundtrack into the mix, and you’ve got a delightful experience that sometimes falters, though not enough to make you put it down. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes might not be revolutionary, but it successfully delivered on its core promise–and that’s really all it needed to do.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy Review – Way Of Shadow
In what feels like a spiritual successor to 2016’s Aragami, Ereban: Shadow Legacy transforms you into a deadly shadow that can become one with the darkness–the ultimate stealth operative. The game doesn’t quite deliver the necessary challenge to make for a successful stealth game, however, as the first trick you learn will get you through the entire game without a hitch. It does far better on the platforming front, and though its cast of characters could have used some fleshing out, the futuristic sci-fi world they inhabit is cultivated with colorful sights and intriguing snippets of lore.
As its name implies, Shadow Legacy’s main gimmick is its use of shadows. You play as Ayana, the last of the titular Ereban, a people who possess the innate ability to become one with and manipulate shadows. Using her shadow merge ability, Ayana can sink into shadows to creep past enemies, slink up walls, and dispose of bodies, encouraging you to stick to the shadows where your toolbelt is at its strongest. Alongside these shadow abilities, Ayana has an assortment of advanced gadgets–some are always useful like a recon pulse that marks enemies and items through walls, while others are more situational like mines that stun targets–which work regardless of the lighting situation.
I initially thought that this would present plenty of opportunities and strategies to sneak past enemies, most of whom will take out Ayana in a single hit. There’s a healthy variety of foes who want to take her down–standard enemies don’t pose much threat beyond the flashlight they carry to take away your darkness, but the more adept snipers can spot you from afar and the stealthy droids who can go invisible can ruin your day if you’re not taking time to look for the telltale shimmer. And then there are the human enemies who present a moral quandary rather than a gameplay one–while the mechanical droid-like enemies that dominate each level can be killed with impunity, murdering the living and breathing human workers will negatively impact Ayana’s morality and others’ perception of her (which I’ll touch on a bit more later).
Unfortunately, Ayana’s natural ability to merge into the shadows and traverse unseen is very powerful–so powerful, in fact, that you don’t really need to rely on anything else. The enemies aren’t very smart either, so they’re easy to avoid even if you solely rely on shadow merge. This means that it’s actually quite easy to go through the entire game without being seen or resorting to lethally cutting down humans, making for a stealth game that doesn’t quite give you enough opposition to challenge you to think critically when it comes to circumnavigating a threat. There aren’t any difficulty settings to make the enemies smarter or more plentiful either–though you can adjust how many environmental guides show up in each level (purple lamps or purple paint that point you in the general direction you have to go, for example).
Shadow Legacy teases you with a tantalizing view of what it could be in its third chapter, briefly breaking free from its otherwise linear stealth levels to give you a playground in which you can tackle an assortment of missions in any order within an open area. Within this open space, you have more of a choice in how you approach each assignment instead of being funneled through a more linear challenge. Mistakes have a more drastic impact because you’re not moving from one area to the next–it’s all one big connected location, where your actions can snowball into unintended effects. Ayana’s assortment of abilities and gadgets also have way more utility in this level. The binoculars used for scouting and mapping enemy movements are way more valuable in a giant open space than in an enclosed laboratory or city street, for instance. The game never opts for this format again, however, and in doing so it leaves me wishing for what might have been.
To the game’s credit, the back half of Shadow Legacy has some creative set pieces from a platforming standpoint, with one section in particular that I adored for how well it challenged and encouraged me to utilize all I had learned up to that point in one fast-paced gauntlet. Shadow merge can be used to eject out of shadows to make otherwise impossible jumps or interact with the environment to solve simple riddles–skills that apply to challenges that steadily get more complex as the game goes on. Even if Shadow Legacy falls short of being a great stealth game, it’s a good platformer. The environmental elements create an assortment of shadows–some oddly shaped, others that move, and still more that can be altered–and figuring out how to reach an out-of-the-way platform is sometimes a puzzle within itself, made trickier and more rewarding to solve given the stamina meter tied to Ayana’s shadow merge. Not only do you have to figure out which shadows to move or follow or jump between, but you also usually have to do it in a timely manner.
In service of these platforming challenges, Shadow Legacy features a colorful diversity of locales, ranging from an outpost in the desert to an autonomous factory. My favorite is an urban street that hints at the human life that once populated it, now devoid of any movement save for the autonomous drones that patrol the streets and promise that this is for the best. Sporadic graffiti and text logs hint at the growing loss of autonomy among the human citizens leading up to the corporate takeover that promised everyone a better life. It’s such an eerie level, framed against the setting sun that’s causing the street to slowly be encroached by shadow. It feels fitting that Ayana uses those same shadows to sneak her way past the guards searching for her, paralleling how the oppressive regime’s efforts can’t stop the resistance–they squeezed so much life out of this one city block that now there’s no living soul to report Ayana to the authorities, just dumb, easily-fooled machines.
Guiding Ayana through these challenges is a story that never quite gets room to breathe. Initially trapped by an AI-controlled entity hellbent on using her powers for some unknown purpose, Ayana finds herself quickly working with the resistance seeking to free themselves from corporate tyranny. Ayana is hesitant to work with them, having heard they’re nothing more than terrorists but agrees to use her unique skillset to help on the condition that the group gives her everything they know about the Ereban people. There are some interesting, albeit familiar, narrative themes here, but Shadow Legacy rushes through them–Ayana buys into the resistance’s cause remarkably quickly, for example, despite being given no catalyst to do so.
In the game’s third chapter, Ayana is warned to spare humans so as to help alleviate the accusations that the members of the resistance are terrorists. This is the game’s morality system, shifting the coloring of Ayana’s design toward shining white or sinister purple depending on how bloodthirsty you play her. As far as I can tell, the ramifications of this only impact one small moment in the final level of the game–it’s not much of a narrative payoff.
At certain points in the story, Ayana can upgrade her shadow powers and you have a choice of whether to unlock new branches on one of two skill trees. One branch leans toward non-lethal abilities, like cushioning your footsteps, while the other opts for skills that make you a better killer, like making it easier to hide bodies so your deeds aren’t discovered. This creates some fun replayability as it’s impossible to fully unlock both branches in a single playthrough, but, again, shadow merge is just too strong. The new powers are cool, but I never had to use them, as shadow merge makes it fairly easy to sneak through a level without being spotted. Granted, I opted for a nonlethal run. It’s possible that if I had aimed for a playthrough where I killed everything that moved, I’d have needed to rely on more of the powers that hide bodies or kill multiple enemies at a time in order to not alert guards that something was wrong.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy sits in a weird place for me. As a stealth game, it rarely challenged me, reducing protagonist Ayana into a one-trick pony that could sneak past any target with the same shadow merge skill every time. But as a platformer, Shadow Legacy incorporates some entertaining puzzles that grow increasingly complex and rewarding to overcome. I never quite managed to connect to Ayana’s journey against the autonomous overlords planning to doom an entire civilization, but I had a lot of fun slinking up walls and exploding out of the darkness, striving to time my jumps with the movement of a windmill and the rotating shadow it was casting. Those nail-biting moments are the ones that stuck with me, not the dozenth time I slunk past an unsuspecting droid.
