I'm no Friend of Jimbo 📄 posted at 25 February 2025 on new danboland

I like Balatro. I think it’s a good game. I’m like one golden sticker off the final Completionist++ achievement. I originally wrote it off as yet another roguelike slot machine, but I truly think there’s something more there beyond the sublimely anodyne feel. The simplicity of the win condition – in essence, get +chips, +mult and xmult to win – the fluidity of the joker system, the amount you have to think about how to use hands and discards to beat blinds, scale, manipulate and get money. And of course, the tremendously overpowered role that money plays in general – infinite rerolls and many methods of money generation letting you force pretty much anything you want on the game, reaching close to (though never quite) transcending the slot machine altogether.

I’ve connected with non-games people over this thing. I’ve used it to time-travel through 12 hour flights and 5 hour layovers. I have a vague distaste for this genre and what it represents¹, but I think this game accomplishes something within that framework, and I’m happy to see a fellow LÖVE user find such soaring success. But there is one thing I don’t care for in the slightest.

If you mosey on over to the Customize Deck submenu, you are presented with the opportunity to reskin the basic face cards. There are currently 24 options, spread across the 4 suits, beyond your traditional kings, queens and jacks. These are all existing videogame IPs, presented as free crossover updates. As of the “Friends of Jimbo 4” update, here are the current options in their order of introduction:

The Witcher, Among Us, Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver, Cyberpunk 2077, The Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, Cult of the Lamb, Potion Craft, Enter the Gungeon, Don’t Starve, Divinity Original Sin 2, Warframe, 1000xRESIST, Assassin’s Creed, Critical Role, Fallout 4², Civilization 7, Slay the Princess, Bugsnax, Dead by Daylight, Rust.

Feel like this series had more notable characters than a HUD element and an empty suit.

Jimbo really gets around. This is the kind of blunt rotation that the gods would punish Prometheus with. This is a series of games with mostly no throughline to Balatro beyond the fact that they sold well. Indeed, some strange clerical error must surely have been made – because Balatro is good, and yet some of these games are quite bad.

Balatro is rather deliberate in how it references pop culture. I think that it, quite intentionally, creates a classic old-money feeling by steering away from insular games / internet culture stuff, a trap games can easily fall into. It references kings, jesters, castles, bananas, baseball cards. The celestial card to level High Card is Pluto, perhaps because it’s debatable whether it’s even a planet/poker hand at all. There’s a really timeless quality to this stuff that I adore – downgrade the engine a little, change the font to extremely aliased Arial, and it’s not hard to imagine an older relative sneaking a cheeky game or two back in the day on a Windows 95 office machine.

That’s why I think this stuff should justify its presence. It feels unbearably tacky and desperate in a game that had such a confident and timeless vibe. So who is this for? Who benefits from the presence of this random IP in a game that was having absolutely no trouble being the runaway fire-on-my-multiplier success of 2024?

This is timeless iconography and all, but it would be more epic if one was the Doomguy and one was Mario. Get on it.

Is this oriented around the players? Were people really going “Well, it’s a fine game and all, but I wish that I could somehow put my favourite characters from Rust in it!” Is it oriented around the developer, someone who’s at least presented as a mild-mannered hobbyist? Developing a searingly-successful, year-defining game and then having to patch the characters from legendarily mid-tier AAA series Assassin’s Creed into it seems more like a punishment than anything. It’s surely something Playstack would make you do if you fucked an executive’s mother and didn’t call her back.

Is this a form of update padding for visibility? Are they jingling the keys for the sake of the holy algorithm? These are tagged as “Major Updates” on Steam, after all, and that’s tied to the update rounds system. After the patch that made the higher stakes a lot less constraining, I’m perhaps the only person in the world who doesn’t think that this game needs a gameplay update and more jokers. It’s fine. I’m actually quite looking forward to getting that last gold sticker and being done with the game. But it’s coming anyway, and that takes time. Better keep the keys jingling with some cosmetics in the meantime. (I’m fairly sure the small legion of streamers and youtubers who play this game, as well as the large amount of mod projects, as well as whatever awards show it swept at, would have kept the home fires burning. But I’m just some guy I guess)

Even so. One fan-favourite feature of Slay the Spire is the beta art, swapping card art with funny amateurish programmer placeholders. Collectible card games make absolute bank by hiring artists to offer their unique take on the classics. Those are two random examples of card cosmetics, and wouldn’t those be at least a little more exciting? It’s a card game. You could do pretty much anything before you need to put the dumbass dude from the Pip-Boy in it.

A lot of that STS beta art does veer towards being too referential, but at the same time. You can’t deny that the pleasure of this image is in its earnest low quality.

I’ve seen very little pushback to this. I suppose watching publishers slam their IP into everything like barbie and ken dolls fucking is not a particularly notable thing, but even so, I feel that I, ante 1 boss, should at least offer the slightest amount of pushback. I can understand the appeal of a crossover that makes sense, and I also understand the crack-ship-wtf appeal of Hatsune Miku in Fortnite or whatever. But this is too banal, too much of a boring intrusion. Why is Dave the Diver here? Well, that game sold a lot of copies. Who needs a better reason?

I don’t particularly care that it’s some free optional bullshit either. Something doesn’t need to be forced upon you to be worthy of criticism. Even within that framing, it’s still tacky, and still represents a lack of imagination. It’s kind of scary that this is how desperate people seem to be getting at both ends of the scale. This is a video game developed chiefly by one bedroom programmer in a humble lil’ Lua framework that I love. It does not need Xbox’s money, it does not need its IP randomly crammed into it. You already got the bag, my brother. You can have the bag and maintain the integrity of your work. Is that not, surely to fuck, the exact and total contents of the dream?

28/02/2025: Localthunk responded to this post over on Bluesky, feel free to read it. On reflection, I don’t see much point in following up on this post, as I’d mostly be repeating myself. I still think it’s weird to run product placement for AAA games in your solodev stuff, and it seems that creates a gulf that’s difficult to cross.