Balatro Pickle Rick
Western society has become Balatro Pickle Rick. But why? I discuss further in my personal review of Balatro and hazy dissection of 2025.
What Is Balatro?
Balatro, according to Wikipedia, “is a poker-themed roguelike deck-building game developed by solo developer LocalThunk, and published by Playstack” or if those words sound too glup shitto to you, then let me cite further:
Balatro is a singleplayer roguelike deck-building game based on the rules of poker. The player chooses a deck, each with unique effects and cards, before each playthrough or “run”. A run is divided into antes, each with three blinds of increasing difficulty. During a “round” against a blind, the player must use their limited number of hands and discards to play poker hands, and attempt to score the required number of chips (points).[5][6] To defeat blinds more easily, the player may purchase various cards which change the rules of the game or provide an advantage.[7][6] These items are bought in a shop in between rounds with an internal in-game currency.[5][8][9]
In many ways, Balatro is just a digitized microcosm of the modern day opiodization of western society in the twenty first century, also known as “The American Century of Humiliation”, which doesn’t even come with opium dens, so now we’re all playing Housing Balatro on Apartments.com and Zillow. See, Balatro is such a mildly pleasant stochastic experience, like some random dude from Canada buffed my pack of Safeway playing cards with a pack of computerized Zyn’s, that you can argue, any grand concept, or institution in western society in 2025 has just become Balatro. Sports went from the MLB, the NBA, into eventually just Sports Balatro. Finance went from trading real physical stocks, to WallStreetBets to eventually just Finance Balatro. And the politics of yore, with its hair raising and existential stakes in many ways is just Politics Balatro.
What Is Pickle Rick?
Pickle Rick, for those blissfully unaware, is an internet meme where the character Rick Sanchez from the Rick and Morty television series turns himself into an anthropomorphized pickle. For further elaboration:
“Pickle Rick“ is the third episode of the third season of the Adult Swim animated television series Rick and Morty. Written by Jessica Gao and directed by Anthony Chun, the episode premiered on August 6, 2017. The plot follows eccentric scientist Rick Sanchez as he turns himself into a pickle to avoid attending a family therapy session.
In many ways, Pickle Rick is the essence of the joke is in itself is “And then he turned himself into a pickle, it’s the funniest fucking thing”, which in many ways was just the Rick and Morty show-runners Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland playing their own version of Balatro on Adult Swim (aka Comedy Balatro), and crashing out memetically in a classic szechuan sauce passive algorithmic wipeout, very much the infamous 2017 Youtube video of watching one man purposefully throw a game of Social Balatro. Which, was then greasily topped off by Justin Roiland’s Chinese condiment soaked run of Balatro that ended up more as a game of Jeffrey Epstein Balatro.
Balatro Is Like Playing Fuji Golf in Fresno
Balatro, is essentially just the same as buying a pack of playing cards from Safeway and playing with it yourself. Balatro is like poker pornography, and not poker itself. Balatro is like going on PornHub for solitaire. It’s not the same experience, not as good, but less messy and more convenient. A soft, dissociated but comfortable trade-off that we have come to accept in these ever increasing and confusing years of our lives. But as we metaphorically play Balatro, we stop playing with cards. Balatro, is essentially an intrusion into the last vestiges of individualistic comfort that we accept is part of our dissociatively normal, ever aging yet tragically melancholic but rich inner lives that we try to maintain as our run of Balatro hits a tough boss blind.
For us Americans, Balatro is like watching football (aka an expansion of Sports Balatro) but now we know what a scorigami is, which is a unique combination of points at the end of the game. Maybe, as a kid you may have asked your dad what happens when the scores are tied and an NFL game “ends”, what happens? Well, there’s overtime, it could be a tie, or the playoffs which made the answer uncertain. As children, all of this rules lawyering and numberwang were fascinating details you could learn but still had an aura of hidden knowledge. And the hidden numberwang felt like something you study or a niche interest you could be the “expert” of to your friends and family. But, nowadays said information is vastly conquered, hyper-optimized, and a “solved problem” that people can learn about in under a minute and reach comparable knowledge.
While scorigami could have been discussed with generations past over a fine Sunday dinner at your grandparent’s favorite Italian restaurant and preserved through oral tradition, instead it is perfected by some distant other and a neatly packaged morsel for you to consume with friends, or perhaps individually that can be delivered via Wikipedia article, Jon Bois YouTube video, or automated posting bot on X, the everything and payments app, with another person setting up an automated alerts bot on Reddit. No matter how hard you try, someone has beaten you to the punch eons ago, and they have already constructed their own Ice-nine from Cat’s Cradle and then proceeded to detonate it. And while said person got to experience being their own Oppenheimer or Dr. Strangelove, you yourself ended up, in Kurt Vonnegut’s own words, being one of those kids who “made model airplanes and jerked off all the time” or perhaps, playing Balatro while living in a post Ice-nine world.
Balatro is the “watch ‘daddy play Fuji Golf’ on the Windows 95” version of Poker.
In observing our third-party we observed how the skill of the individual (or perhaps, Western Man) fare against the chance elements in an exciting, “extended cinematic universe” while being digitally produced and distributed to you real time. Now, you could “watch daddy play Fuji Golf” in Fresno instead of “Fuji”, a distant and mythicized place that you could see but not feel. In many ways, Balatro is a modern day Solitaire or even perhaps Windows XP Pinball Game but thanks to our hyper-competitive society, has now evolved into modern-day English, or as I would call Balatro English, “algorithmic gambling addict gooner slop” but with “probability theory characteristics”. Balatro is the precise feeling we get when we hear the phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” — utterly random because it is dependent on the individual to interpret that phrase positively or negatively but also with digitalized assistance and hyper-aesthetics we are carefully steered towards a strongly preferred outcome of the “friend” who just invoked this phrase.
Balatro Is Like Playing Back Alley Bridge On A GPU
Balatro, is a microcosm of the authenticity our parents traded away for comfort. As part of my family, we had a card game we played called Back Alley Bridge, which is effectively a modified version of the game of Spades where the Two of Diamonds (or 2♦) is essentially turned into Exodia, The Forbidden One from Yu-Gi-Oh but just for one round. You played the 2♦? You automatically win the round, but not only that but if you played first, everyone has to place down their best card. The 2♦ would be the “tactical nuclear WMD” that every player at the table had to negotiate and reason with vis-a-vis, tit-for-tat. With the 2♦, you could effectively be a Kim-Jong-Il to your opponents for a brief spectacle. But those “opponents”, would be your parents or grandparents, or other relatives.
Balatro, on the other hand, is a digitalized Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 hyper-processing addled along with a opium-like hyperaesthetic disassociation experience. Balatro can be the most mechanically efficient and personalized version of Back Alley Bridge, but it never feels the same. Instead, it leaves us with a whimsy ennui that ignites our inner child to order a Happy Meal but finish the experience starving for something more. Instead, us children are aura farming a physical card game, which is a tried and true tradition carried on by the four horsemen of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic The Gathering and now Balatro. Your parents played Balatro at a casino, and back then it was called poker apparently, but instead you play Balatro as it leaves you feeling as if you’re in the cuck chair of metaphysical discomfort while being sedated pleasantly with, turn after turn, non stops turning playing poker into the same experience as eating out on a Tuesday night at Chipotle. Balatro is to Vegas as is the aesthetic equivalent of white millennials getting really into Ableton Pro and producing their own Music Balatro on Spotify. They sure get closer than I do, but the more I consume of this autism poker cognito-hazard, I just crave for an analog version of it, a hazy Vegas of yesteryear. Instead of getting said Vegas experience, we slowly suckle from Balatro’s pleasant melancholic stochastic teat for the comforting price of a Big Mac in 2025, yet the nutritious value of this game leaves us craving for more and an ennui that I can only describe as Food Balatro: Shrinkflation Expansion Pack. For me, personally, this hunger I feel are the software engineering and statistical elements of this game that tickle my deep ennui. The more I consume this game, the more I develop the tiniest of a phantom limb that imagines If I Did It like a modern day OJ Simpson but instead of Love Balatro it’s for Jobs Balatro. That is to be said, in our society, someone has always beat you to the idea, much akin to OJ, they were slowly speeding ahead of you in their White Bronco some time ago. They built the perfect version of what you could have thought you built, but you yourself were “coaxed into a snafu” to playing this infinite game of Balatro, maybe gooning at it. But knowing you are stuck, falling down the metaphorical stairs of life as your automated reminders sent to Gmail warn you of “I told you about stairs bro”, you start to feel like you are part of one giant Pickle Rick meme, so your personal game of Balatro metaphorically corrupts itself into what I call Balatro Pickle Rick, the hazy memetic stochastic hyperaesthetics that have become our lives in western civilization. You can try playing Jobs Balatro on LinkedIn, but sadly there are no “Balatro Player” roles available. And if you were really good and have a “friend in the diamond business” maybe you could make a small career out of it much as you could “oyster farming in Maine”, but even then you would have to Twitch stream and LeetCode your career to algorithmically compete in the same “marketplace of ideas”, but also money. You could earn more (or less) of what your parents did back in the day, but when they had Back Alley Bridge jobs while you yourself would still have a Balatro job. You could be a 99.9th percentile Triple Nine Society genius in your field, the equivalent of LeBron James, but metaphorically feel like Bronny James because at the end of the day, your job is just Balatro with extra steps, very much like that quote from the Pickle Rick show about “slavery with extra steps”. In the days past of the NBA, yet another variant of Sports Balatro now, we yearn for the Back Alley Bridge days of Michael Jordan yet we are treated to the real “x3 Mult on free throws” joker himself, Shai-Gilgeous Alexander. Truly, One Bucket After Another in our NBA Jam expansion pack of Sports Balatro.
Spiritually, We Are Children In A Dead Adult’s World
Balatro in itself reminds me in many ways, spiritually, we are children in a dead adult’s world and we we mimic their patterns in an obscenely farcical and eventually tragical manner. Are we truly adults, or children cosplaying as adults? How can we truly be our own parents without fully living in the world they left us with? Instead, we are just LARP’ing a game of house but with only an Airbnb Check-Out To-Do List of rules meticulously written down, laminated, and color-coded that we selectively choose to follow or not follow. Everything of the old version: A ”Nazi” is now a “Groyper”, a ”Communist” is now a “DSA member”, a “Pedophile” is now a “PDF File” or “Jeffrey Epstein”, A “suicide” is “committing sudoku” or “unaliving oneself”. We are living in our parents world with our rich and powerful “rosebud;!;” has turned into a hyper-decadent waning “infinite money glitch” that peaked during the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon (ZIRP) days of the 2010’s, managed by Balatro Finance professional e-sports team FedRez Clan, the professional likes of Bernanke, Yellen, and “JPow” playing through their own, personalized Balatro Finance in their swanky nouveau riche gaming chairs from D.C. via monthly Twitch streams titled Federal Open Markets Committee that are mass watched by Balatro Finance: Stocks Deluxe Edition players from the WallStreetBets Reddit community. and using that satanic knowledge in the game of Balatro Finance that feels even dirty for a Summoning Salt video about speed runs, we have this new meta we’re trying out involving the ritualistic bastardized step-child of machine learning for Balatro Tech and pumping it with circular deals until we hit a tough ante, but hey, the multiplier on those Straight hands is looking mighty fine. But alas, as we nervously watch the distant ménage à trois of Balatro Tech, Balatro Finance, and Balatro Politics it just becomes more colorful and hyper-aesthetic content for our own game of Balatro Pickle Rick that we are always “skull-fucking”, “mogging” and unceremoniously slaughtering and humiliating our game in our day-to-day lives, yet it never touches upon that ashen, cigarette-smoked, Circus Circus in Las Vegas (or may I say, Fear And Loathing) haze that we intrinsically desire. Yes, even in those sweaty, real stakes, real meat in the flesh games of “skill and chance” in the pits of a casino, there is a fundamental “high” that you cannot reproduce without actually grasping it, talking to it, or even feeling it. You can try to recreate the culture that once was, the zest, the sleaze of it all, be your own autistic Tony Scarface or Temu Hunter S. Thompson by binge drinking Lagunitas IPA’s, grass, mushrooms, ketamine, Chinese research chemicals, acid, or even ether but at the end of the day you’re just playing Pharmaceutical Balatro. Each personal episode from your life, that may feel as if it was out of a chapter of Pulp Fiction is nothing more than just another hand of Balatro with Pickle Rick characteristics. You may try to act like you’re Steven J. Lockjaw from One Battle After Another, but instead you’re just another Bob Ferguson smoking grass trying to fumble through downloading the Balatro Pickle Rick iOS app on the Apple Play store while vaguely remembering which of the thirteen or so addresses you put down on your credit union debit card when entering the billing address to pay for our digitized Safeway playing card experience. You could have your own personal Wikipedia, or scorigami’s, or history, but someone else already did it for themselves and the whole damn world. Instead, all what is left is for you to be like an observer from StarCraft yet you are just one unit on the entire map, and the rest is fog of war. As an observer have no ability to attack, your defenses are limited, anyone can hypothetically one-shot or Charlie Kirk you one night, but you realize that Nothing Ever Happens (until it does). Instead of your own history, you, the observer, the digitized cuckold you are, get to observe the richly edited and highly objective digitized Wikipedia articles of world history. The revolution will not be televised, instead it’s a roguelike digital holocaust that will be stochastic gradient descent hyperparameter fine-tuned into a 30 second TikTok meme for Generation Beta to consume in their history books over candlelight. Yet even being digital cuckolds for this Balatro Politics game between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, it feels more like someone blended what could be a rich article in The Economist or Foreign Affairs into a kale green AG1 smoothie to pair along with another round of Balatro. For both international and domestic politics, each election held, each G20 conference, each distant drone war execution uploaded on 2025’s equivalent of LiveLeak gets turned into yet another Twitch Balatro, yet another Hasanabi electric dog collar shock incident moment for us to discuss during our own attempt to win at Balatro Pickle Rick. Each of us while playing this game, having a deep inner experience that feels like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End internally but it slowly just becomes an amorphous blob of feeling like Balatro One Piece. But, knowing that we are digital Frieren in this story makes us sad, so we look for our digital Himmel The Hero but alas we know we are no better than the 9/11 rescue dogs trying to desperately search through the remains of our own digital World Trade Center for survivors. The impact has already happened, the world has been Ice-nined and you are stuck playing Balatro Pickle Rick with your fading distant memories of Back Alley Bridge. That, in itself existentially is like playing Balatro without any jokers, a treatlerite with no treats. So to fill our void, we buy as many jokers as we can with our shrinkflated Balatro earnings via digitized W-2 statements and other tax forms with help of Tax Balatro. We have become eternally jokerified, each our own Dollar General Joaquin Phoenix (unisex edition) as a society so we mercilessly enhance our “Two Pair”, “Full House”, or even “Royal Flush” hands with endless plus-one’s to create purpose or even win at Balatro in our lives, but at the end of the day, you always lose in Balatro. But as we keep losing in Balatro, we keep slowly, individually up-skilling ourselves at Balatro, in the hopes of winning at Back Alley Bridge just one more time. But in our digital, walled gardens of Balatro that have us skill-maxing our use of playing cards, tarot cards, the literal solar system in itself like we are Maxx’ed Out Black-pilled GigaChads 1000x stim-pakk’ed StarCraft: Brood Wars Terran Marines slaughtering a Zerg Rush while going “ohhhhh yeah” and ejaculating on ourselves, cleaned up with technological assistance with “cloud computing costs attributable by AWS region”, courtesy of Dude Wipes and Ozempic with the production quality of NFL Sunday on Fox. We reminisce of our “winning days” or K/D ratios of old but now we are the “Varsity Quarterback who almost won state title” but represented on a collective, nationalistic, identitarian level. The collective consciousness of us billions has been reduced to “Top Ten But Each One Gets Crazier” reel, but also its epic fails and bruh moments. That we traded knowing each other personally, for at first statistics, then Wikipedia, then Pickle Rick, and eventually just what we call “slop” in 2025 for us to ignore. Balatro Pickle Rick is the collective metaphorical feeling of getting your first smartphone, switching to Gmail, getting Amazon Prime as a college student, but in decades past your youth. Just another digitized rickshaw to add to our endless internal video game HUD that we thought would become Cyberpunk 2077, our great white hope of a sci-fi Back Alley Bridge but rather we’re just playing a bootlegged copy of Sci-Fi Balatro, but at the end of the day it’s just modded Balatro Pickle Rick.
Baseball Is Like Western Society And Now It’s Balatro
Major League Baseball, a sport I watched rigorously as a kid, feels like the most prime and cognizant example of devolving into a Balatro Pickle Rick memetic low energy “Top Ten Slop” highlight reel production in 2025. When seeing baseball more like Back Alley Bridge rather than Balatro Pickle Rick, it could be seen, naively, as a microcosm of the “political economy of the world”. The regimented, dichotomous, red team vs. blue team, “small market” vs. “big market”, tit-for-tat physical game that defined America in the twentieth century. That innovative magic that turned the British game of Rounders into what feels like a Bayesian statistician’s hazy ketamine wet dream they simulated a couple thousand times in R, just as much as Balatro is the insane hyper-genetically modified version of poker. In baseball, it’s One Battle After Another. Each game a battle and each season a war, or WAR perhaps, yet we can never go back to the days of what baseball felt like when we were playing Backyard Baseball 2001 or when your dad had physical copies of the Bill James Fielding Bible. When Backyard Baseball 2001 felt like Back Alley Bridge, it was this fun game you played during the dog days of summer where you picked up all the big leaguers and won by record breaking scores of 73-0. Yet now in our Balatro Pickle Rick age of western civilization, when I mentioned Backyard Baseball 2001 you just think “how many of those guys did steroids?” and “Pablo Sanchez OP lol”.
Each MLB franchise, even with its storied histories, can now be described through various Pickle Rick style one-liners instead of unique connotations for ourselves. YouTube videos, SBNation commenators, et cetera can give you a three hour, forty minute hyper-aesthetic history of the Seattle Mariners but watching it just feels like a very long but exciting game of Balatro. For each of your personal, tasteful but maybe less refined opinions about the Seattle Mariners that you may or may not have played in Ken Griffey Jr’s Winning Run, someone has already beaten you to the punch, you got Balatro Pickle Rick’ed and now your memories for this space have been overwritten by algorithmic content once again. You can have all these weird, personal opinions or experiences with America’s past-time but now Googling each baseball team all feel like the same distant, sardonic reaction to that phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, that is, something we learned online and accept as fact instead of writing our own lore.
The Yankees? The 2001 World Series was their Pickle Rick moment. Besides that, they’re as American as American Airlines is, but in many ways each Aaron Judge home run feels less like Team America World Police in pinstripes but rather yet another legendary Balatro run with less than ten thousand views on YouTube.
The Dodgers? Liberal internationalism. they’re more of a Tokyo or Tel Aviv team, recently some may describe this team as “spiritually Israeli”. As a child, I would personally be devastated if they won the World Series, but now, watching Game 7 a couple of nights ago just felt like a tough loss in Balatro. Shohei Ohtani might be their Two of Diamonds but at the end he’s just another legendary Balatro joker, the apex of his career happening distantly, like some cursed Out Of The Park Baseball 2026 simulation instead of Backyard Baseball 2001. Which in many ways, OOTP is just Balatro for digitized 2010’s Billy Beane spreadsheet autism baseball nerds, seeing Line Go Up doesn’t hit the same as hitting an aluminum bat power up grand slam off a digitized copy of pre-pubescent Randy Johnson during the 2000-2001 California electricity crisis, caused by Balatro hall-of-famers Enron. While you were playing digital baseball Back Alley Bridge, your parents were caught red-handed doing some real Balatro Pickle Rick fuckery themselves in their Windows XP edition of Balatro Finance, that is now part of your own inherited round of Balatro Pickle Rick.
The Pirates? Historically third world-ist Maoist insurrectionist baseball. The Pirates fielded the first all-black lineup in 1971, won the World Series that year, and a year prior their pitcher, Dock Ellis, famously pitched a no-hitter on acid. Yet in this narrative, of hazy, loosely connected acid-ism and adderall-ism, The Pirates just had a few good Balatro jokers for a “hand” and Doc Ellis happened to play a legendary round of Balatro. It doesn’t make sense, but as it all blends together, in the words of Oscar Gamble, or dare I say, Oscar Balatro, “They don’t think it be like it is, but it do”.
The Athletics? A refugee crisis of a baseball team where thanks to the assistance of MLB’s partnership with the UNHCR, a camp was procured in West Sacramento, Yolo County, California. Yet, what should be a confusing multi-year episode of Arrested Development but in the Central Valley feels nothing like the debuff from a boss blind in Balatro. Just a distant factoid and experience that is happening, that we are numb to, for the next Jon Bois (or successor) to monetize as a YouTube video for their “oyster farming but for baseball autism” career.
My Team? The Giants. My own glorious “good guys” (against their, evil “bad guys” The Dodgers) themselves have themselves a classical western society “checkered past”, given what happened with the “territorial rights issue” in 1990 where The Athletics ceded part of the local media market to them. In itself, a political sour grape that feels more like a geopolitical spat than sports history. The franchise itself clearly peaked with its three World Series wins in the 2010’s though, and it hasn’t been the same since. These victories in themselves were great accomplishments, but in many ways it feels like watching “Madison Bumgarner pitch Game Seven in 2014” was more so just a legendary joker Balatro run.
Baseball in itself, while once a beautifully unique concept, with the excess of new information and technology has become another version of Balatro. There are pitch clocks, Manfred runners, three batter minimums now and it feels all like Balatro Pickle Rick instead of Back Alley Bridge. And as western society becomes more of this, the MLB is no longer thirty baseball franchises or geopolitical entities, instead it’s thirty Balatro players, each team with their own jokers, rolling hands, to win games. Just like all the other sports. As the old saying goes, “Baseball, they say it’s just a game. True, and the Grand Canyon is just a hole in Arizona.” which effectively you could just tack on, “True, and Balatro is just buying a deck of cards from your local Safeway and developing a Python prototype hosted on Vercel during the weekend over a couple of Adderall XR’s.”. That is to say, a very Balatro experience you could have, while the anonymous creator of Balatro himself had a very nice and sweet two years of Back Alley Bridge software development for you to personally enjoy, served up on Steam for only $10.99 USD and probably less during the upcoming Christmas sale.
Until Our Parents Come Home
As our own, personal zeitgeist, becomes more congested, more inter-connected, the small happenstance or weird or algorithmic things we see drive us insane that our parents would have the liberty of doing a “How do I open PDF?” to modern-day complex realities. These realities get condensed into “meme icebergs”, tier lists, and eventually just Balatro Pickle Rick which ends up driving you crazy, so it brings you back to Journalism Balatro to write your first article in over half a year, for sheer love of the game, the writing experience being my own personal run of Balatro that I try to desparately sandcastle into my hazy, slightly better memories of Back Alley Bridge. But alas, here I am, just a caucasoid tranny who helped engineer The Algorithm for Therapy Balatro a few years ago, now just writing schizophrenic articles about western society and video games for The Algorithm on Substack or just a platform-specific Balatro. Our parents are “away in Las Vegas for the weekend”. While they will enjoy a tranquil dream at the Bellagio, we still play Balatro, wondering when we will see them again for a round of Back Alley Bridge. We see their symbolic return as a persistent, carrot-on-a-stick that we attach to ourselves as an incentive to “behave good and take care of the house” to hope that we can, play a Two of Diamonds on them again. Otherwise we can reminisce wistfully of the physical, Back Alley Bridge scoresheets we kept stuffed in the kitchen junk drawers, a real decentralized blockchain in itself. Each, the equivalent of a baseball scoresheet, that will be only known in our distant memories and never on a site like backalleybridge-reference.com, but as we think more of these moments, they end up all becoming just more and more like Balatro. And that is the central tenet of understanding the western world in 2025, we as a world our metaphorically “trying to kill ourselves ironically” in an endless game of Russian Roulette but it just becomes Balatro Pickle Rick but with firearms, each ante is just another tick of the doomsday clock (it is 89 seconds to midnight as of now) but it just feels like a losing round of Balatro for us personally. We can even try to spice up our game of Russian Roulette. We can try using random chambers, random bullets, we don’t even care if the safety is on our off in our highly specific “In-N-Out Well Done Animal Style Fries” ritualistic 360 no-scope execution attempt, but at the end it’s just another round of Balatro: Guns Expansion Pack. And we can keep firing to see what happens but, alas, Nothing Ever Happens in the land of Balatro Pickle Rick, until of course, it does. In this digitalized Safeway playing card Futurama Suicide Booth (set to slow and roguelike) experience, we don’t know each other anymore, we certainly know ourselves less and our parents are out for milk and cigarettes at the Bellagio but gave us the “keys, credit card, social security number, and vehicle warranty information” of their past to look through. But after a while, the fun of our parents being away becomes boring. Our hopes of no adults is all fun and nice, until we realize that we’re no longer playing Back Alley Bridge, we’re just playing Balatro with Pickle Rick characteristics. As our reality sets in, we make “RETVRN” montages for Back Alley Bridge like it’s a 69 cent Taco Bell Beefy Five Layer Burrito but alas, the president is playing Finance Balatro: Federal Reserve Edition with Jerome Powell, so we’re stuck financing our DoorDash treats with Klarna while hoping we can pay off our debts in Balatro Pickle Rick but through RobinHood and Gusto. We can drink as much Mountain Dew Baja Blast as we want, but no amount of Operation Soda Steal will come close to having it the first time as a kid, nowadays the color of the soda looks like a color you’d see in Balatro. So, as we play this round after round in our own custom version of Balatro Pickle Rick, our needs slowly dwindling from spiritual ennui, we keep ourselves digitally opiated while dozing off to memories and future dreams of our parents coming home, hoping to see them tomorrow. And if not, well we can just fire up another round of Balatro until then.
Balatro: ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭒ 4/5 stars
Reading this felt like finally figuring out the word that was on the tip of my tongue. Thank you.