Balatro News
IGF 2025 nominees show what a wild and vibrant place indie gaming is
Last year's defining indie smash hit, Balatro? Not nominated for the IGF grand prize. Animal Well, which turned damn near every games journalist into a tiresome obsessive? Not nominated for anything. UFO 50, an impressive, important, big boy achievement snubbed by our own 2024 list? It did get a Grand Prize nomination.
I don't disagree with any of the nominees or absences in this year's Independent Games Festival Awards, so I don't mention any of the above to stir up trouble. Instead I look at this list and think: wow, video games are more varied than ever, so much so that there's no longer a dominant cultural narrative even within the specific niche of indie gaming.
Balatro mod Jimbo's Big Naturals is a lot funnier and safer for work than it sounds
Gentle reader, I have previously written exactly two boob-related articles in my life. One was a cheesy round-up of the best manboobs in video games for Green Man Gaming's long-vanished blog. It was published sometime in 2010, and IIRC, pre-reboot Kratos came out on top. I think/hope it still exists somewhere in the apparatus of Green Man Gaming, hidden beneath the retailer's veneer of respectability like a barrel of radioactive waste. The other boob article was a piece for OXM about Ken Levine saying that he wished people would stop fixating on Elizabeth's cleavage in Bioshock Infinite - a complaint we might consider slightly hypocritical, given the character's visual design.
Now it's time for boob article number 3: some modder has given 122 of the 150 Jokers in cardgame Balatro big chests. This extends from visibly human Jokers to Joker concepts that shouldn't, strictly speaking, have the capacity for boobage. The banana card has boobs, for example. The credit card card has boobs. Behold.
If you can put Balatro down for half a second, the lead dev behind it has recommended some other stunning indies with a very low-key awards ceremony of their own
Balatro Dev jokes about adding loot boxes to lower 18 age rating, highlighting the "real gambling" EA Sports FC gets away with
Balatro, which was a runner up for The Game Awards' Game of the Year award, is certainly a popular game. However, for months now it's been plagued with a black mark of sorts on digital storefronts. This, a Pegi 18 rating indicating the game is for adults only, remains after months of pushback, despite other games with real gambling staying up at a 3+ rating. Earlier today, the solo dev of Balatro brought issue to the issue yet again.