Being a Balatro-like has nothing to do with being about cards.
A Balatro-like is a game that makes 14-hour flights feel like 20 minutes on the bus. A Balatro-like game is one you feel you should probably uninstall from your computer during work hours. It’s the kind of addictive trance that a youth theatre troupe would come to your school to warn you about.
From the minute I saw 30 seconds of Raccoin, I knew exactly the effect it would have on me. The premise of the game is simple. You’re playing a coin pusher (or a penny falls if you’re from Scotland), inserting huge gold coins into a moving field in an attempt to push the coins in the bottom section into the prize zone.
It’s a game that you’ve likely played 100 times in real life when your parents wanted two seconds of peace during a rainy holiday to Blackpool. Like any great game of this type, the core mechanic is simple, which allows Raccoin to layer on the ridiculousness.
Each round, players have a target score. You can manipulate how much each of the coins you drop is worth by applying one of the dozens of modifiers or by inserting special coins. One coin will increase the value of every coin it touches. Another will cause an explosion that sends coins flying.
Modifiers will allow you to return a special coin to your coin clip after you use it. Some modifiers will turn your special coins into zombies that infect the coins around them with the same effect. This is essentially the Jokers from Balatro.
The joy of Raccoin really shines through when you’ve triggered so many effects at once that it feels like your PC is about to explode. That feeling of getting one over on the game is intoxicating. For example, when you build up a multiplier, you get a chance to spin a prize wheel. One of the sections on that wheel sends you to a bonus wheel with better rewards, such as massive coin towers.
In one of my best runs, I found a coin that would guarantee that I hit that second wheel on my next spin. However, since I used the zombie modifier on that coin, I essentially had that second wheel bonus for 10 spins in a row. Towers of hundreds of coins would be built, then instantly knocked down by another tower of coins being built behind it.
“The joy of Raccoin really shines through when you’ve triggered so many effects at once that it feels like your PC is about to explode”
Then, just to see what would happen, I launched in a coin that spawns a tornado, sucking in all the coins around it. My game became a slideshow as all of these different variables kicked in. My score was flying up as the game struggled to track what kind of bonuses I should be entitled to, all while still desperately trying to build towers.
Every so often, coins with negative effects will be dropped into the game. These can stop you from using the multiplier, stop you from exchanging tickets for more coins, and have other annoying effects. There are coins you can buy to deal with them, so they’re a manageable inconvenience, but they will trip you up on good runs if you’re not paying attention.
There are various characters you can choose to play as, each of which comes with its own quirks, be that increased ticket exchanges or more wheel spins. As you complete runs, you’ll also unlock greater difficulties.
My gameplay only stumbles with the game so far, and it’s the same for a lot of games of this type; the early rounds become somewhat tedious as you keep playing. While you can still use these early rounds to buy coins and start to work out your plan for the genuinely very tough rounds, if there were an option to skip to round 5 from the jump, I’d likely take it.
Raccoin is also in desperate need of a Nintendo Switch 2 and a mobile port. While, like Balatro before it, the Steam Deck experience will likely be the main way lots of people engage with it, once it hits phones, I doubt I’ll play anything else on a plane for the next year.
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