Balatro

Balatro hides the score so the payoff lands after you hit play. Players commit to a poker hand without knowing what it will score, then watch a staged reveal: numbers tick up with escalating sound effects, each card and joker steps forward in turn, and a hot multiplier catches fire and burns brighter with each multiplication.

LocalThunk believes the game is more fun when you set up your Rube Goldberg machine and watch it go before knowing whether the hand wins. A pre-calculated score would make all that pageantry pointless. "The joy of Balatro lives in that precise moment... when you cross your fingers and hit play."

How much information you show changes how players act and feel. Hiding the score makes Balatro players act faster and adds drama to every hand, the same kind of lever as showing or hiding a boss health bar or enemy intent.

A preview would also clutter the UI, slow play as people check every hand, and turn a chill card game into a spreadsheet. Cards with random properties would force the UI to show a range of scores.

LocalThunk refuses even an optional preview to protect his intended game. He says a score preview encroaches on Balatro's DNA, and that players would just click the option and never experience the game he wanted to make.

He made the game for himself and is not interested in changing it for others, even a million of them. The broader rule: know exactly who the game is for, because making it better for one group can make it worse for another.

Hidden information that effort can uncover gets optimized by players anyway. Balatro sold a million copies in a month, yet its score can be worked out from known values (a straight is 30 chips and 4 mult; add card chips and a joker bonus for 137 x 4 = 548), so some players keep a calculator, a second-monitor spreadsheet or a Steam overlay calculator open while playing.

LocalThunk calls the missing preview a "fundamental design flaw" and a "cursed problem" he has not solved, and is bummed that the best play now means busywork outside the game. The design only holds if players choose not to calculate. Soren Johnson: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

Gate, frame or outsource an option you don't want to endorse. Mark Brown suggests Balatro could offer a preview as a late-game unlock like Chrono Cross's fast-forward, behind a cheat code, with a warning like Celeste's assist mode, or through mods.

A cheat code works for console players who cannot mod and means players must actively seek the option out. For now the issue affects only hardcore, strategy-minded players; the host played about 30 hours without pre-calculating a score, but it may haunt the developer as the game's long tail stretches out.

Add information players already extract by hand when it's only busywork. Playtesters tracked which cards they had played to work out what remained in the deck, so after polling users LocalThunk added a deck view.

Many were doing it "even though it really wasn't much fun." The test he applied: whether the workaround is tedious busywork or part of the intended experience, which is why the deck view went in but the score preview did not.

The Binding of Isaac's hidden item effects became a wiki-lookup game. Isaac hid what items do to recreate Zelda-style mystery, but wikis explained them within about five seconds of release, and sites like Platinum God became the standard way to play.

Edmund McMillen calls the missing descriptions the game's biggest flaw and in 2023 said he was considering adding them as an option. The External Item Descriptions mod has almost 2 million subscribers on the Steam workshop.