Another Steam sale is upon us, and while this one's not directly hosted by Valve, it is shining a fantastic spotlight on some of the best games made by tiny dev teams - including a gambling roguelike so good it's even got the Balatro dev's seal of approval.
Yogscast Games - yes, the popular streaming group has its own indie publishing label - is presenting the Tiny Teams event on Steam, highlighting "very best of video games made by small teams from around the world." It's one part sale and one part demo festival, offering discounts on released games and highlighting trial versions of unreleased titles.
Some of the sale highlights include the venerable farming RPG Stardew Valley, the genre-defining Vampire Survivors, and the GotY-winning deckbuilder Inscryption. If you wanna go spooky, you can horrifying visions of fishing games in Dredge, visual novels in Slay the Princess, and co-op games in Phasmophobia. If you want something new, there are even sales on 2024 indie breakouts like Animal Well and Balatro.
But Balaltro brings us to one of the more interesting titles in this sale: the newly released Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers. This is a deckbuilding blackjack roguelike that stretches the rules of the game into an RPG-style battle system where hearts offer healing and clubs increase your damage. Naturally, you'll find all sorts of weird takes on traditional playing cards to build up a deck and break the game.
Despite sharing the idea of turning a traditional gambling game into a deckbuilding roguelike, Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is no Balatro ripoff. This week, Balatro creator LocalThunk offered "another reminder that D&DG went public before Balatro" while giving the game a strong recommendation. Heck, Balatro's own Joker even appears in Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, and I can't image a bigger seal of approval than that.
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