CloverPit review for PC

Ever since Balatro hit it big, we’ve had no shortage of Balatro-likes that have tried to apply a similar formula to other familiar games. If you like Scrabble, there’s Wordatro (and Birdigo, and Letterlike, and countless others). Blackjack? Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers. Yahtzee? Tesserarii. Mahjong? Aotenjo: Infinite Hands. And so on, and so on, and so on. It turns out, developers are really interested in adding score multipliers and extra strategy on top of already strategic games.

Or, in the case of CloverPit, in adding multipliers and strategy to games of chance – specifically, slot machines.

Of course, the problem with that is probably obvious right from the description. Yes, there’s an undeniable element of luck to Balatro and all its imitators (to say nothing of the broader universe of roguelike deckbuilders), but they also take a fair amount of skill to master. Slot machines are entirely games of luck, with no skill whatsoever involved. Literally all you do is pull a lever and hope for the best.

That said, it’s interesting to see how CloverPit at least makes an effort to add a strategic element to slot machines, to say nothing of a broader story. The gist of the game is that you’re trapped somewhere vaguely hell-like, and you need to keep earning more money to unlock a door and escape to…somewhere else (the game never really explains itself). If you don’t, you drop into a pit and die. Along the way, CloverPit adds lucky charms that make it easier for you to earn more, which you buy with tokens that you earn from spins.

On the one hand, CloverPit is undeniably addictive, at least for a little while. How could it not be? People get hooked on slot machines even when it ruins them, and even if CloverPit is a little different in terms of how it all works, the underlying mechanism is still the same.

At the same time, though, it’s not exactly the most varied gameplay – it’s mostly just pressing a button over and over again, and hoping you’ve picked the right combination of charms to maximize your payouts. You occasionally get to answer a phone and pick from a few extra multipliers, but it feels like CloverPit relies on the same kind of inertia that compels people to sit in front of slots, feeding coin after coin for hours at a time. It’s an intriguing idea for a game, but it’s not nearly deep enough to sustain itself.

Future Friends Games provided us with a CloverPit PC code for review purposes.