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 wants to raise questions about what gambling is and what makes it so insidious. After a handful of hours with it, I’m not sure it answers those questions yet, but it’s definitely made me think about my own relationship to games of chance.
This article initially appeared 6/10/25 and focused on CloverPit’s demo. We’ve updated it today for the game’s full release last week.
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. Different symbols and patterns are worth different payouts. Developer Panik Arcade writes that, despite all this, the game “is not a slot machine simulator. Our slot machine is designed to be broken and ultimately overcome.”
This is done via tickets you earn, which can be used to buy trinkets from a display. These trinkets can give you extra spins, increase the value of symbols and patterns, give you more luck, or have compounding positive effects. One that’s saved my ass more than once is the trinket that can offset the effects of turning up a “666” on the machine, which takes all your money. Some trinkets operate on their own, while others require pressing a button to activate and then have to recharge. What trinkets are available is random, and you unlock more as you play.
You also get calls on the phone that give you additional modifiers. Like trinkets, these offer more variables for your run, though they can sometimes also be negative effects. Combining these modifiers with the right combination of trinkets is essential to beating the increasing stakes you need to keep moving through the game.
Now that the full game’s out, I can tell that there’s more going on in CloverPit than the demo let on. Beating the game doesn’t appear to be just a simple matter of making enough money to get the key to let yourself out of the room. But the crux of all this is still pulling the lever over and over again and seeing what comes up.
Despite the developers claiming the game isn’t a slot machine simulator, my brain sure saw it that way. It is terribly compelling to keep pulling the lever. I was able to import my demo data into the full game, and I could have sworn I was having worse luck somehow, or the game was harder, or something that was probably just the insidious rot of slot machines: assigning a narrative to random outcomes and then being sure you can tell your own story despite knowing it’s all just random. Trinkets can bend the game to your will, but only to an extent. I’ve yet to spin up some kind of fool-proof engine like in Balatro; tooltips hint that it’s possible, but I’m not sure I trust that promise.
Faced with little in the room besides the slot machine and vague promises that I can break it if only, the whole game became exactly as compulsive, exciting, and absurd 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 treasure chest symbols, I felt like the greatest player alive; when a 666 came up and ate tens of thousands of my coins, I cursed my luck aloud. I stayed up hours past my bedtime, sure I could win with one more spin, one more trinket, one more run.
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.
At the same time, as RockPaperShotgun notes, there’s something a little cynical in CloverPit and other, similar gambling simulators. Is showing a bad thing the same as actually commenting on it? At one point, CloverPit gave me the option to stop playing, and then punished me for deciding I’d had enough; in another run, the game mocked my character for their compulsion. This blaming the player for things the game forces them to do is a bit of a hallmark for games that want to comment on themselves, and it often feels a little cheap to me–what else was I supposed to do? From what I’ve played so far, I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about gambling besides the reminder that I’m definitely susceptible to it, though it’s possible there’s more to all this that I haven’t uncovered yet.
Still, despite the above, writing about the game makes me wish I was playing it instead; I am not better than “pull lever, win prizes” however much I posture I am. I want the highs and lows of gambling’s randomness, even in a game that wants me to be aware of how destructive they are. Plus, the game is just pretty fun: the combination of randomness and using trinkets and modifiers to try to craft the perfect build is an enjoyable challenge, however far it carries you. CloverPit is out now, and its demo is still available if you want to check it out first.
