June 24 - Some Thoughts On POLTERWORX

Neither of us care about POLTERWORX.

Balatro, if you haven’t heard, was one of the best games last year. It was probably my game of the year; if it wasn’t, it was at least top three. It’s a sublime design presented excellently, with enough unique decisions to make it endlessly replayable.

But it’s also a game that is just begging to be broken. Infinite scores, ridiculous combos, everything else you’d expect in the endgame of a truly breakable roguelike. This aspect of Balatro’s design is what attracted me to the modding scene, which is something I rarely explore in the games I play.

Enter, then, Cryptid. The Balatro mod which proudly promotes itself as “wildly unbalanced”. I watched some videos of the mod, played around a bit with it myself, and I have come to the conclusion that it promotes itself correctly. For each joker that single-handedly wins you a run, there are at least two which do less than nothing. It’s still fun to break, but for different reasons: while the base game is fun to break because of what a unique challenge it presents, it can only be broken so much. The e308 floating-point barrier is the ultimate challenge of breaking base Balatro.

In Cryptid, that barrier is almost trivial. Instead, the joy comes in bringing the game to its knees: creating a combo that takes so long to execute that the game crashes, generating yourself infinite money, or scaling into numbers so high that you need to use multiple e’s to track them.

But in some sense, that still isn’t enough. There are higher scales of numbers, googological spectra that Cryptid doesn’t even register on. How much worse can it get?

Enter, then, POLTERWORX (née Jen’s Almanac); it and Cryptid are often billed together as the Big Number Balatro Mods. After, again, watching some videos and playing around a bit with it myself, I again came to the conclusion that it sure is busted.

But I don’t want to actually review the contents of POLTERWORX. You don’t care about the contents of POLTERWORX. I don’t care about the contents of POLTERWORX; at least, not enough to write a review of them.

This story was much moreso to provide context. I am discussing a niche mod of a niche mod for a notable indie release. It’s not exactly something I’d expect a man off the street to know anything about.

Yesterday, a dramatic discord ping told me that POLTERWORX was being cancelled. Development had stopped, and the various download links to the mod were being pulled. There had been some sort of drama entirely internal to the discord server which I had no context whatsoever for; the guy had stolen assets, but apologized, but kept getting harassed, and so on. Again, neither of us care enough for me to provide any more detail than that.

But there was this moment as I read this overdramatic discord announcement.

Sometimes, we all fall prey to the assumption that other people are simpler than us. They don’t have the same internal lives: they are NPCs, they are animals living from their base instincts. The guy you’ve been on hold for an hour to speak to is blandly evil; the woman who just cut you off in traffic wants you personally to suffer; the employees at the fast food chain are barely even conscious. I exaggerate, but not entirely.

I read this announcement, this stupid announcement for this project that I don’t care about, and I remembered that we’re all just fucking human beings, and we’re all just trying our best.