Don’t feel too bad if Eskom spoiled your evening plans to watch IGN’s ID@Xbox livestream event last night. The stream was privy to hundreds, if not thousands, of frantic Hollow Knight fans just begging for a glimpse of Silksong, alongside a couple of indie titles, a new trailer for Lies of P, and arguably the biggest news of the night: Balatro is coming to Game Pass.
What are you still doing here?
Now there’s no excuse to not dip your toes into the wonderfully weird pixelated world that is Balatro. If you missed out on LocalThunk’s GOTY-worthy sensation that was released a little over a year ago, Balatro is a poker-like roguelike that’ll have you itching at the neck and forgoing visits with the family in the pursuit of “just one more hand.” Now imagine that, but ‘free’.
Balatro is available on all three Game Pass tiers – Ultimate, Standard, and PC. Apple Arcade subscribers can also pick up the mobile version of the game at no extra cost. Be warned – the controls are… iffy at best. Still, there’s nothing quite like securing a win in the back of an Uber.
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During the ID@Xbox livestream, we also got a new trailer for Balatro, revealing the ‘Friends of Jimbo (Pack 4)’ DLC that’s introducing even more purely cosmetic cards from franchises like Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Bugsnax, Rust, and Dead by Daylight – joining the likes of The Witcher and Stardew Valley already available in the game. The (Pack 4) DLC is out now on all platforms.
Another small win for developer LocalThunk is the bumping down of Baltro’s PEGI rating to 12+ from the 18+ rating it had received previously. The European rating system initially classed Balatro as for adults only after its release for containing “prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling,” despite the roguelike not featuring any sort of real-world gambling.
