It’s almost shameful. To play Clover Pit is to collide with gambling head-on. There, in front of you, is a slot machine, perhaps the purest expression of casino gambling there is. And there’s the handle on the side of the machine for you to spin the drum within. Go ahead and rotate the columns of symbols in the hope they’ll slow and stop into a scoring pattern on the screen. Did they? It doesn’t matter – you can always spin again.
For a moment, that’s all Clover Pit seems to be: simple and crass. It even yells “Let’s gamble!” as you spin the drum. It’ll make you wonder why people thought Balatro was problematic – at least that game has the strategic innards of Poker in play. Here you just pull a handle. But that’s not all Clover Pit is. As you get up from the slot machine and take a step away, you’ll see a room around you, an oppressive kind of basement-slash-prison cell. And there on the tables and walls around you are the things that make Clover Pit tick.
But hang on: why are you in a basement? You don’t know. All you know is you’re here to spin in solitude. There’s no one else and no discernible way out, though there is a grated metal trap-door beneath your feet, which looks like it could give way at any time… And you’re in debt – a debt which rises each round that you play. A machine on the wall shows you how much debt you owe, and has a coin slot for you to put your winnings into, to repay it. Spin the drum, win the coins, satisfy the debt. That’s what you know. Or else.
The nuance comes from the things around you. Posters on the wall clue you into the game’s scoring, explaining that different symbols score different amounts of points, obviously, but also that you can score in multiple directions. You can match symbols in a horizontal line and vertical line and in diagonal lines, as well as in more elaborate shapes besides. This means it’s possible to score in more ways than one, at once. Fill the screen with symbols, then, and scores will ring-up like a cash register at Christmas.
Then there are the ways in which you can affect chance, which you do with charms. These are collectible power-ups bought with tickets – tickets like the papery ones you earn at an arcade. Charms do a number of things, and there are varying rarities of them and they appear randomly in the shop-stand behind you in the room. Some charms increase the chance of getting certain symbols, whereas others increase your luck, which I think means your chance of getting symbols to match each other. Other charms, meanwhile, increase the number of spins you get, or increase the value of symbol-matches as you play (very useful).
In other words, charms are your build, much like Jokers in Balatro. They are your mark upon the game, your strategy. (A phone call between rounds bestows another charm-like boon or buff upon you, from a choice of three.) But you can only have a handful of charms at once – you’ll see them arranged on a table beside the slot machine, and some charms need charging after use, and others expire after being triggered a number of times. Your build requires your constant attention, then, and adjusting as you play.
It’s intoxicating. I genuinely struggled to pull myself away from it, which now I think about it, seems appropriate given the nature of the game. I feel a frantic desire to pull the handle again and that seems correct. The game trades on this. Clover Pit walks a line between parody and celebration of slot machines and their addiction, and walks it well. It houses it in an intentionally unsettling atmosphere, as if we’re in debt to the devil and this is a kind of hell, and it’s a feeling that permeates through the experience. On the one hand it’s exhilarating, on the other hand, dangerous.
It’s more than I expected. Clover Pit actually brings to mind the murky card-game Inscryption, I think both for the atmosphere it creates and because you can explore a room around you. There’s mystery, there’s intrigue, and I didn’t expect that here. What I did expect was high-score fever, though, and the dopamine-popping fireworks of multipliers and combos – the kind that make Balatro sing – are absolutely here too. Don’t expect to be able to put it down. I did warn you.
