Remember the whole dust-up about whether Balatro is gambling? Perhaps inspired by that situation, roguelike CloverPit also insists it’s not gambling. In the most basic sense it’s not–there’s no money involved–but by forcing the player’s attention to the mechanics of slot machines, the game’s Steam demo raises questions about what gambling is and what makes it so insidious.
In CloverPit, you find yourself in a creepy metal room with an ATM, a phone, and a slot machine. When you win money from the slot machine, you put it in the ATM. You need to deposit increasing amounts of money to keep a trap door from opening under your feet and ending your run.
The slot machine works like a normal slot machine: You pay for a certain amount of spins (weighing the cost of your choice against the money you need to feed the ATM), pull the lever, and a random assortment of symbols comes up. Developer Panik Arcade writes that, despite this, the game “is not a slot machine simulator. Our slot machine is designed to be broken and ultimately overcome.” You do this by using tickets you can earn to buy trinkets from a display. These trinkets can give you extra spins, increase the money value of certain symbols, give you more luck, or prevent negative outcomes such as turning up “666” and losing all your money. Some trinkets operate on their own, while others require pressing a button to activate.
You also get calls on the phone that give you additional modifiers, like earning you more money or making some slot machine patterns more valuable. There’s some graffiti scrawled above the phone warning you not to trust the caller, so I’m curious to see what that looks like in the full game.
That’s basically the deal! Despite the developers claiming the game isn’t a slot machine simulator, my brain sure saw it that way. It is terribly compelling to pull the lever and see what happens. Outcomes felt random to me even with my trinkets; in a game with strategy like Balatro this would be frustrating, but faced with little in the room besides the slot machine, the whole thing became exactly as entrancing and exciting as a real-life slot machine. At the same time, because randomness has such a different weight in video games, I felt hyper-aware of this; I felt like I was watching myself do something random and stupid, reaching for the lever before my spin had even fully finished, starting again when I died, certain I could crack the code. When I got a jackpot, filling the slot machine screen with coin symbols, I felt like the greatest player alive; when a 666 came up, I cursed my luck aloud. When I won, making it through a requisite number of rounds to end the demo, I leaned back in my chair with a gasp, my heart pounding, even though I couldn’t be sure what was my own skill and what was just dumb luck.
Panik Arcade writes, “If you’re looking for a real gambling experience please look elsewhere. Or better yet, don’t look at all. We don’t really like gambling. That’s what the game is about!” I can definitely see this: CloverPit’s horror vibes and limited mechanics really put my focus on me and how I was reacting to the game, whether or not I was getting overly invested in one of the grosser inventions of humanity. As a kid, I had an inexplicable talent for horses and dogs, when my dad would place bets for me at the track and I would consistently win absurd amounts of money. I’ve sometimes wondered if I should see if that skill still stands; the way I felt playing CloverPit made me realize I should probably definitely not.
The developers write that the full game will have multiple endings and more items, and plan to release CloverPit this summer.
