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Pretty Good Hat

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I started playing Balatro and, alas, it’s such a good game! I don’t care much either way about poker, and Balatro adds a fun, challenging layer of modifiers and risk that makes it awfully hard to to put down.

A Balatro screenshot. I have drawn a straight flush (diamonds) from several face-down cards.

I had such a good experience playing Ashen last night that I want to share. (I mentioned playing Ashen in my week notes.) It has an inventive multiplayer mechanic that pairs the player with another player at approximately the same place, if one is available. If one isn’t available, you get an NPC companion, who is often quite competent but sometimes prone to disappearing or falling off ledges.

Last night in a new area – a dark, winding, flooded canyon – I was matched with another player1. Even with fast travel, the game does such a good job with art and environments to create a sense of being somewhere new, dangerous, and far from home. My new companion appeared at just the right time, as I approached a small camp of several strong marauders by myself. Together we handily took them out, and then we carefully moved along gangways from platform to platform high over the water, fighting enemies and finding quest items and treasures nearly in unison. They went down once and I revived them; later they returned the aid when I was surprised and overwhelmed, appearing with a flurry of heavy blows to finish off the enemies swarming me.2

Ashen screenshot; the player’s character in a cloak stands on a cliffside in the sun, facing a cityscape that recedes to a huge capitol-shaped building on the far ridge. The color scheme is muted pastel and autumn leaves on the scattered trees, which the player hasn’t seen since the first area of the entire game.

We progressed for a long time, maybe 30 minutes, silent companions leapfrogging from small patches of light and safety back into skirmishes. At a chokepoint in the route, far into the uphill journey, I was long out of health renewal items and getting nervous. We faced one final cluster of tough enemies and then pressed up a very long corridor, to emerge finally into bright daylight, in a brand new environment, in sight of a fast travel monument. We were safe! This was a really cool semi-social adventure that perfectly showed off the game’s theme of finding hope – and help – in a dark place.

  1. Real players are identifiable because their movements are a little more unpredictable. The loop often goes, “great, I have a partner, are they real or — oop, they just ran away, they’re real. ↩︎

  2. Each player only gets a single revival between rests at monuments, so this put us each in a vulnerable position going forward, ratcheting up the tension. ↩︎

Screenshot from Against the Storm, showing a crowded village center. There is a cozy hearth surrounded by shelter buildings and a large red warehouse building tucked tightly within a forest.

There’s a whole meta campaign layer to Against the Storm, but I’m pretty perfectly content to just make little villages where my lizards can bake pies and cozy up by the fire.

Screenshot of a pixel-style game showing a party of player characters on the right side and a giant floating monster with rays of light emanating from it, on the left.

I’m really having a good time with Chained Echoes. This was the first pretty hard boss and I had to think about how to handle it, revising my tactics and leveling up my party a bit more before I successfully finished it off. This is a great Steam Deck game for kicking back on the sofa.