[Arainach]

Unlike Universal Paperclips, I actually have a desire to play Balatro more than once.

It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available"

The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automation both the game and you are proceeding towards the heat death of the universe and all you can do is accelerate it.

It's also a time boxed game - if you ignore the Civilization "one more turn" effect, any given game will be over within 20 minutes.

[jerf]

The "time boxing" is coming to be one of my favorite aspects of the roguelite genre. It's a nice structure for a combination of a deep and compelling game, that opens up at a reasonable speed, but also doesn't call for 80 hours to "finish" it. I like JRPGs but even so they quite often overstay their welcome. Death may wipe nearly all your progress but you can easily try again in another timebox.

(I played some of the classic Roguelikes, and spent a lot of time with Angband, but that was one of their problems... winning still took many hours, could easily be dozens, and so death became very scary. They were on to something, but the modern rebalancing of "hand it all out more quickly, and resolve the game in an hour or two and let them come back" seems a much more practical approach in a lot of ways.)

[RickHull]

I never played Angband but got into the closely related Sil. Totally agree on your characterization (and a fan of your HN posts for well over a decade).