Balatro Review (Crystal)
Perfect standard card deck roguelike
So first of all, it's not exactly poker. LocalThink (developer of the game) says it himself. The only poker things in the game are poker combinations and overall thematic (small blind, big blind, etc).
Your goal each time is to beat the score which progesively gets higher. You are being dealt 8 (usually) cards out of which you have to play up to 5 to get as best poker combination as possible. You can make a simple 1-card combination stronger than 4-of-a-kind. You can turn your standard deck into not so standards one, with only diamond cards, for example, or 20 Aces. And you also get Jokers, which are essentially trinkets, which change the whole loop of the game (you want to play Flush, but you have only 4 cards of the same suit? There is joker for that). There are 150 different jokers in the game, and they really add a lot of extra mechanics and approaches to it. The game does a really good job playing with these concepts of modifying your deck, changing amount of points you get for different poker combinations, incorporating extra gimmicks and points from all sorts of Jokers. There are just too many different scenarios of how you can make the things to play out. Of course, I've described here only some of the basics and one would need to try the game for themselves.
And yes, the game is not exactly easy. Even standard difficulty might take you a lot of time to get your first win. At the same time you cannot say that the game is unfair or there is too much randomness. It is possible to win 99% of games on standard difficulty (if not 100%). Mathematically (and from my own experience) you have plenty of space to maneuver and keep winning game after game. Which is why there are higher difficulties, which are not only about getting higher scores, but present also new unique game mechanics. Some of them actually make it even more fun.
This is the only roguelike I can think of, where I repeatedly (and many times so) continued the run into the endless mode, because it was just that satisfying and challenging to see how far I can get.
Anyway, I already wrote too much. Everybody knows about Balatro. And if you haven't yet, then you do now. Absolutely 100% recommended. All the awards it already got and will keep getting are well-deserved. So go meet the Jimbo and remember that probability is your best friend and enemy. And be wary that it gets addictive.