With the Balatro rush slowing down — by which I mean I now play once a week instead of every day — it's time to start the search for my next daily time sink.
I'm ready to find the next game that I'll lose hours to, muttering "just one more round," and worrying the friends who see me spending 80 hours a week playing it.
It was just one year ago that Balatro made its big impression on the Steam Next Fest stage — eventually going on to release and garnering industry-wide acclaim, including one of our Game of the Year 2024 nominations. And, not to brag, but I saw that early whiff of excellence for what it was.
With roguelikes in no short supply during this year's Steam Next Fest (February 24 to March 3), I've explored four that might just capture your attention for the next 365 days, until we're on the search for the next one all over again. Let's get addicted, y'all.
Developer: Nue Games
Genre: Balatro-like pool roguelike
Platform: PC
Release Date: Q2 2025
Most of my pool knowledge comes from video games. Whether it's the myriad of pool flash games that nearly every site put out or the random pool minigames you'd encounter in some open world game, pool was always a fun diversion. I never really knew what the rules were, but I knew I liked lining up shots and setting up my angles just right to knock the balls into holes.
And Ballardo lets me do just that, stripping away the pure pool concepts for something more like Balatro that is all about building ridiculous synergies to make numbers go up.
In Ballardo, you've got a limited number of shots and replaces (that allow you to move your cue ball) to beat a specific target score. It's all about knocking these pool balls together and sinking them in the pockets that have the best multipliers available. There's no worrying about stripes or solids. Just knock them into pockets and watch your score rise.
In between pool rounds, you can buy stickers and apply them to balls; they might boost their point scores per collision or their "strength" in launching other balls when hit. You can also grab relics that do things like adding a vacuum suction effect to pockets when a ball drops in, or even an explosive effect to pockets to send balls flying, snagging you even more of those collision points.
There's some kind of pure satisfaction in watching an opening break in a pool game, and it's amplified even further when you see the score popups flying out of each ball as it collides with others. I need to see an even larger variety of unique modifiers to be fully convinced that this can capture the addiction Balatro served up, but Ballardo's pool-based take is already intriguing enough for me to keep an eye on it moving forward.
Developer: Brandon Hesslau
Genre: Bullet hell dungeon crawler roguelike... but on your desktop
Platform: PC
Release Date: 2025
If there's another roguelike king that's spawned an entire genre of games all on its own, it's Vampire Survivors. There have been innumerable indies released in the last few years tasking players with fending off enemy waves by dipping and diving between them and using attacks that you have no direct control over to slowly chip away at the oncoming horde.
Most new takes on the genre that I've tried never quite feel like they truly freshen things up. But Desktop Survivors 98 uses nostalgia and a unique control system to make one of the most interesting Survivors games I've played in a minute.
In Desktop Survivors 98, you play right on your own actual computer desktop. The game overlays across your screen, and your player character is... your mouse! Doorways and barrels pop up over your screen and you click your way through a dungeon, using your mouse to dodge through the creepy crawlies that emerge from the edges of your monitor's screen. As you play, you pick up XP orbs and level up to unlock new moves that are entirely built on '90s PC nostalgia.
WordArt launches classic chunky Microsoft Word lettering across the screen horizontally from your mouse in an arc. Recycle Bin shoots out deleted files in a shotgun blast. Solitaire gives you a stack of cards that shoot out and bounce along the bottom of the screen in that classic victory screen way we all know and love. It's all so fun, and if you have any wistful associations with that era, you'll be smiling from end to end.
The most interesting aspect for me is the mouse-based control. In every other Survivors game, you're limited in your dodging ability by each character's movement speed, and sometimes your best runs can end early simply because you couldn't outrun someone. In Desktop Survivors 98, your only limit is your own mouse's sensitivity. It's so much more engaging with this small tweak, and I felt more capable than I ever had in games like this because of it.
I can easily imagine tossing Desktop Survivors 98 into my daily routine, especially with the game's click-on click-off interface that removes the overlay with a click and allows you to step away without difficulty before continuing a run — and if you're ready to protect your PC's home turf, too, give this game a shot.
Developer: Le Poulet
Genre: Word-building roguelike
Platform: PC
Release Date: Q2 2025
Scrabble + Balatro = Wordatro. It's the second Balatro-like on today's list and is blatant about its influence in a way that I truly enjoy.
As a writer, I like words. I like word games. It goes deeper than that, though, because my love for word games is basically hereditary. I grew up sitting on my mom's lap as she and her sisters would gather around a Scrabble board and play the most tense rounds of word building I've ever seen, with their scores reaching double what I normally lay out when I play.
Wordatro takes Scrabble scoring and adapts it into the round-based tension of Balatro. You try to build the highest-scoring word possible from your collection of letters while utilizing the unique modifier skills you unlock between each round. The length of the word defines your multiplier, your word score defines how many points are multiplied, and you need to beat steadily increasing target scores to get through each round. Additionally, those bonus skills you can unlock add crucial points — for using consonants, for example, or for typing back to back words of the same length.
One of the most interesting twists on the Balatro-like formula is the fact that the energy you rely on to form new words does not refresh in between rounds. In Balatro, you've got a set number of hands to use in every round. But in Wordatro, you start with three energy and only get two back when you finish the round. It makes word choice that much more strategic, because winning by using all your energy will only set you back in later rounds. It's an interesting strategic twist that makes Wordatro trickier than expected, even for a word game veteran.
If card games aren't your thing and you felt you were on the outside looking in with Balatro, Wordatro could be the one for you.
Developer: TrampolineTales
Genre: Maze-based bullet hell roguelike
Platform: PC
Release Date: TBA
Maze Mice comes as a follow-up to TrampolineTales' last highly addicting roguelike, Luck Be a Landlord. And the lessons learned have clearly made this one to watch, because I may have delayed my day's work because I just had to do just one... or two... or three more runs before I was ready.
Maze Mice is another Survivors-like, but in a format that is so much more approachable than I expected and is simple enough that I feel anyone can hop in and have some fun in what can otherwise be a brutal genre.
It essentially plays like Pac-Man, as you navigate through tight mazes collecting orbs of XP while dodging past cat enemies that chase after you, but with a few key differences.
1) The world and its enemies only move when you do. So instead of having to make really tight split-second decisions about which path to turn down, you can really take your time and imagine the path ahead of you and ensure your safety.
2) After gathering enough XP orbs, you'll unlock a skill that will help you fight back against the cats chasing you down. Whether it's a flame path that trails behind you and does constant damage or knitting needles that you launch backwards eight at a time, your little mouse is not beholden to "power pellets" to fight back.
With these two things combined, you're able to really work to maximize your damage on the oncoming cat armies and thread the needle of outmaneuvering cats by picking the exact moment to make a turn or by lingering a bit to wait for the chasing horde to slip past you.
It makes this genre, which is defined by large hordes of enemies and bullet hell-like attacks, infinitely less intimidating. Maze Mice is cutesy, it's fun as hell, and it turns the basic maze game into way more than the usual game of cat and mouse. (OHHH! I GET IT NOW.)
While my picks here fall into two flavors — Survivors and Balatro lookalikes — there are endless other roguelikes with Steam Next Fest demos out through March 3, ready to get you in their clutches. So, if one of these looks like your new habit-forming game, consider wishlisting. It's one simple thing you can do to help these games find the attention they deserve on the Steam storefront and guarantees you won't forget to dive in when they launch.
Want more on upcoming games? Check out our Steam Next Fest coverage and mini-previews.