I know everyone else is saying it but I literally just put down Balatro to play jam games and here I am lol
What I liked:
- God damn this is the most enjoyable game jam game I've played yet and I've probably played at least 30-40 at this point. The game feel was just really there, it just felt so fun to play.
- The game was actually intuitive. Of the card based rougelikes I've played at the jam, a lot of them either didn't have a tutorial, weren't intuitive at all, or both. While I was going through your tutorial, I was like, "alright, this is definitely too simple for what this game is gonna be" and then it was actually the perfect amount of information to get me going. It's really hard to make one of these games intuitive and it's really hard in general to make a good tutorial so great job!
- I thought the UI was extremely clean and straightforward for the most part (see below). The game looked great and the UI had a clear intentionality and hierarchy of importance
What I thought could be improved:
- I thought I was softlocked when I couldn't play in column 2 and also I think corners and didn't have any space and I think it was just lucky that I tried clicking everywhere and discovered you can stack chips but despite how great the early game learning was, I missed this completely and it almost stopped me from getting past the first few minutes. Not sure what the fix would be but this was frustrating for a bit
- The keep card system and generally, picking a card every turn was a bit overwhelming and I was honestly confused how it works. My understanding after playing through 8 rounds is that I get to permanently keep those cards? And it's always 2 but I'm not sure how they're chosen? Also, selecting a new card every single turn just felt like a lot. I kinda wanted to just keep playing but also, obviously that's how the game works so I don't feel great making this comment
- I think it would've been really helpful to see how many tokens I've won each time I place a chip. I could see what each card was scoring and the final result of each multiplier but I couldn't see what total the multipliers were using and in terms of game feel, it would've just been nice to have a sense for how many tokens I was scoring each round so I could see myself improving and such
- I found myself playing the same strategy over and over and placed my chips in the exact same spots every time and then just tried to pull cards that would maximize playing the same exact tic tac toe every time. It just didn't feel as fun, it felt a bit like routine to just place my chips in the same exact place every single time. See below for what I did every turn
X X
"X | | X" then "X | X | X" then "X | X | X" then I'd just stack them on the middle as high as I could
X
- This is a small thing but I didn't realize chips could have different values until like round 6 and maybe it might be good to make that clear somewhere or maybe you did but either way, I didn't know
- Some of the UI was covering the cards in the top corner and just overall, a lot of the cards were packed together so I couldn't get a good read on what was hitting. The fun of your game to me is the Balatro-esque watch number go up and this got in the way of that
- I'm gonna be honest, this game has basically nothing to do with the theme of this jam at all. Between it's quality and the fact that it is so clearly not on theme, I almost have to wonder if this game was build with additional time but I kinda mean that as a compliment haha. But yeah, I gave you really high scores in everything except theme lol