Balatro was one of the biggest successes of 2024 on Steam and still attracts a lot of players today. It also challenges the developer – after all, they struggled with achieving 100% in the game for a long time.
What kind of game is it? Balatro is an indie game from the developer LocalThunk that skyrocketed in 2024 and has continued to enjoy very strong ratings on Steam up to today. Currently, 97% of the reviews are favorable, granting it the status of “Extremely Positive.” It is the highest-rated game on Steam in the past year.
- Essentially, Balatro resembles a poker game that has been transformed into a Roguelike deckbuilder.
- In each round, you must achieve a certain score to progress. To do this, you have to play good poker hands.
- The trick lies in the special jokers in the game that you can incorporate into your deck. This leads to various builds with different success rates.
Balatro is generally regarded as a game that is very hard to put down once you’ve started playing. Nevertheless: Obtaining the game’s most difficult trophy – namely the 100% – is hardly achieved by anyone.
Even the developer LocalThunk found it challenging. Up until today.
LocalThunk has finally succeeded, now wants more content in their game
This is what LocalThunk says: The developer spoke out on social media and reported that they have finally achieved 100% in Balatro and thus the title “Completionist ++.” They mentioned playing a few rounds before going to bed, incorporating the game into their daily routine. Additionally, they explain that this has better prepared them to build the 1.1 update for Balatro.
Lastly, they said: “I’m looking forward to doing it all over again with the new content when it’s available.” Luckily, LocalThunk has this completely in their hands.
A long journey to 100%: In fact, LocalThunk had already spoken out in April 2025, stating that they had completed Balatro. To achieve this, they had defeated each deck on every difficulty and also shared their own builds.
In the same breath, however, they also mentioned that they still had not quite achieved 100%. According to the achievement guide on Steamcommunity-com, it is necessary to obtain a gold sticker with each joker – and this, in turn, requires victories at the highest difficulty level. And that is very difficult given that not every joker is strong.
Balatro was released in February 2024. Now, in June 2025, and thus 16 months later, LocalThunk has achieved their goal.
LocalThunk has now succeeded, and other players will want to follow suit. What are your experiences with Balatro? Are you also aiming for the 100%? Let us know in the comments. And if you’re looking for more games that don’t fall into the AAA category but are still extremely fun, check this out: Here are 9 games on Steam that are just as good as AAA games but cost less
