Platinum #152 - Dishonored 2

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

They say variety is the spice of life, and Dishonored 2 is a classic testament to this philsophy. No 2 playthroughs are the same and the multitude of options give the player a genuine sense of freedom and choice that are only constrained by the limits of your own imagination. 

Set 15 years after the original, Dishonored 2 is a tale of reclamation. After the death of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin in Dishonored, Emily Kaldwin, the natural heir to the throne, is due to take her rightful place as bloodline successor.

The ceremony is crashed by Delilah Copperspoon, claiming to also have royal blood and therefore, an entitlement to succession. The ceremony becomes violent and Emily Kaldwin and Corvo the Protector are framed as killers following the massacre that ensues.

This immediately gives the player your first crucial choice of the game, and one of the biggest gameplay differences in Dishonored 2; Who you choose to play the rest of the story as. Emily Kaldwin or Corvo the Protector. This choice will influence various other gameplay elements, including the subsequent supernatural abilities you'll have access to and the playstyles of each character.

Whoever you don't choose is bound into stone by a spell cast by Delilah Copperspoon, giving you your key motive for the rest of the story - To free your counterpart from the spell by exacting revenge on those responsible for attempting to overthrow your rule.

I thought Dishonored was a strong entry into a new series, and I think Dishonored 2 does enough to build nicely on that. 

The level design is borderline genius, with multiple different ways to bypass objectives and deal with elimination targets, giving you plenty of power over how you beat levels. If you're looking to earn the Platinum trophy, the trophies will dictate how you play to a certain extent, but the depth of possibilities is still to be admired, and every level location has great attention to detail with the options it lays out for you. They're not always obvious and in plain sight either, rewarding exploration and experimentation.

On the subject of level design, it's also important to shout out some of the level mechanics too. The Clockwork Mansion adding the extra level of intrigue by transforming it's layout based on the pull of a lever, and how this can be used to find secrets, new routes and plan escapes. Aramis Stilton's Mansion - Where you find a timepiece that allows you to go back in time to when certain areas of the building contained different features that help you progress objectives. It's so clever and is the standout feature of the game.

Dishonored 2 also builds on the supernatural powers system, offering a bespoke set of powers depending on which protagonist you choose to play as, and also includes a general complimentary balance to both sides of utter chaos and absolute stealth, depending on your playstyle. Acquiring Runes will allow you to unlock more abilities, and most abilities are tiered and can be upgraded to provide stronger benefits.

There are also much greater dialogue options too. Corvo was a silent protagonist in Dishonored, which left much of the lore down to the interpretation of the player. Both Corvo and Emily contribute large dialogue to what unfolds around them, naturally fleshing out the story. I wouldn't necessarily say it improves the story much though, which is a little bit disappointing given the fact the game actively opened up speech contributions for it's main characters. Alot like Dishonored, this is a tale driven by revenge and there's not much more to it than that.

The game does have other flaws too. Melee combat is unpolished. Hit detection is so wonky to the point where you could take as many as 5-6 swings to hit an enemy and still not register a blow. This also extends to the usage of powers too. For example, using Blink and Far Reach should be seamless, but you spend most of your time trying to line up your landing position to ensure you reach where you intend to and it ends up being way too finnicky.

These are small gripes though, and not to be held against the game too harshly. I think it's an improvement on the original and the improvements are big enough to help the game excel above it's predecessor. 

Regarding trophies, this is a large list of 51 trophies, including the Platinum trophy, and is very reminiscent of the original game's list, with alot of overlap and recurring feats included. You'll also need to plan carefully, as some trophies are either specific to each character and their powers or specific to how you choose to play the game.

If you're tactful and plan well, you can get through this game in just a couple of playthroughs, though I did fumble on one trophy which meant I had to go through the majority of the game a final time, which is slightly frustrating given the fact it was just one trophy and I had to progress very close to the end in order to fulfil the requirements for achievement.

The "Clean Hands" trophy, awarded for Completing the game without killing anyone, returns from Dishonored, and underpins your low chaos playthrough of the game.

Due to the fact I earmarked this trophy as the hardest from Dishonored, I felt this was the place to begin, and carrying over previous experience would stand me in good stead for a playthrough where I also just focused on enjoying the game and collecting whatever I could in terms of trophies along the way.

The things you need to be aware of are exactly the same things you needed to be aware of in Dishonored. You'll need to make sure that you neutralise every assassination target you encounter throughout the story, rather than killing them, and you'll also need to make sure you don't kill any enemy soldiers, howlers, thugs or witches along the way. Non-human enemies, such as Clockwork soldiers and Hounds are dispensable, and you're allowed to eliminate these particular foes. They count as non-human enemies and therefore do not detriment the achievement of this trophy.

If you're neutralising normal enemies, you'll also need to make sure they're not left near any potential hazards that cause them to die when you're not looking. Things like dumping an unconscious body close to water is a risk, as is leaving bodies next to things like whale oil tanks and within sight of rat plagues that could digest the body. All of these things could cause unexpected accumulation of death counters that you may not be aware of at the time. I would always avoid conflict wherever possible and in the event of having to render a foe unconscious, ensure their body was placed carefully away from any potential hazards. Behind doors and secluded in rooms was always a safe bet.

The game will report back to you on stats after each level, and one of these stats is the number of deaths within the level. I always made sure this counter read 0 after every level, and ensured that I'd made a hard save to checkpoint my progress, just incase I got stung by an unnoticed death at some point later down the line. In worst case scenario, you can always reload the save and begin the level again, so it's a fairly foolproof method, and this statistics report is huge in terms of being able to track your progress towards this trophy.

Along the way, the game rewards you with a decent amount of progression-based trophies. Some of these are unmissable and pertain to certain plot points and some are based on story decisions that you'll be awarded an alternate trophy for later on as long as you ensure you make the opposite decision. The latter is important to make note of in order to prevent any additional unnecessary playthroughs of the game.

Pursuing this trophy also unlocked trophies for the following feats; Finishing the game with either Emily or Corvo (another trophy to be aware of making an opposite choice for later on). Finishing the game without supernatural powers, which is another decision you make early on and requires you to consciously choose to not obtain powers throughout the game. Completing the game without being spotted and completing the game in low chaos.

One thing I took away from Dishonored was that I'd mismanaged the trophy list, and my learning from that was that I was going to be much more efficient in Dishonored 2, and looking how to best maximise earning as many story completion trophies at once, and minimising replay necessity. All of the above trophies are best done in tandem and compliment each other perfectly.

If you're focusing on not killing any enemies, then refusing to take supernatural powers makes the most sense, as many of these are used to bolster your arsenal. Similarly, if you don't kill anyone, you'll naturally finish the game in low chaos and therefore, it's the perfect fit for these trophies to compliment one another. Engaging in combat means you'll be spotted, so again, if your primary aim is to get through the game without killing anyone, it also makes sense that you strive for the trophy that rewards you for not being spotted. Tactfulness pays off in Dishonored 2, especially when it comes to tackling the trophy list.

By the time I'd completed this initial playthrough of the game, I'd unlocked 25 trophies - Exactly half. Much of this was the aforementioned non-missable, progression-related elements of the list but I did manage to accidentally stumble upon a few secrets that I wasn't necessarily looking for, but happened to award trophies in the process.

Even though I still had half the list to earn, there was only one primary focus remaining. Beat the game again, but on high chaos, which is where the the majority of the remaining trophies lie.

What was remaining at this point were alot of trophies focused around earning kills, which are simply incompatible with a playthrough that requires you to beat the game without killing anyone, so this grouping of trophies had to be reserved for the high chaos playthrough. There is also a trophy awarded for beating the game selecting Corvo, but that was the only other thing to take into account, and the challenges on a second run lay with other parts of the list instead.

The list technically has 27 trophies which are deemed to be missable, and this is alot to juggle if you're intending to beat this game in just a couple of playthroughs like I did. Some of these trophies are missable because they're married to another trophy that are both awarded for making opposing choices at certain spots in the game. Some are missable because they're tied to collectibles that you won't be able to go back to collect once you reach a certain point in a level (this would sting me later). Some are missable because you have to perform specific actions within certain levels and whilst the game does include a mission select feature, this will overwrite your progress automatically, so it's better to just make sure you grab these trophies during a normal playthrough.

The game is especially heavy on collectible trophies and this is what ultimately caused my undoing with this list. Acquiring all collectible paintings, collecting all the decorative objects for the Dreadful Wale, Finding 60% of the available loot throughout the course of the game. Even the more cryptic trophies such as Finding 2 musical duos across Karnaca, and listening to their songs, Killing Paolo three times and Robbing Galvani multiple times are technically collectible because you need to trigger a certain instance multiple times, and should you miss one, you'd have to dedicate a fresh playthrough of the game to obtain the relevant trophies for each of these tasks.

Dishonored was exactly the same, and it elevates the trophy list into an intricate level of planning and research. It's also one of the main reasons I led with the non-lethal playthrough. It would be overstimulating to have to deal with not being spotted and/or killing anyone whilst attempting to balance all of these collectibles, and high chaos just simply requires less focus and allows you to shift your attention to ensuring you're fully focused on not missing any collectibles. And even then, I still did.

It's not exactly notable in it's own right, because in reality, any of the above mentioned trophies could have slipped through the net - It just so happened to be the "Royal Spymaster " trophy, awarded for Perusing all journals and audiographs by Meagan Foster and Anton Sokolov aboard the Dreadful Wale. Between each chapter, the Dreadful Wale acts as a hub where you can see mementos you've collected, gathering intel and collect more lore. New lore becomes available between each mission, and I'm not quite sure what happened, but I suppose I missed something that meant the trophy didn't trigger when it was meant to.

This meant I had to spend an additional 5 hours playing through the game once more. I managed to rush through for the most part, and the final group of collectibles comes just before chapter 10, which is near the end of the game. It's nothing more than a slight inconvenience really, but it's frustrating having to juggle so much and see just one small thing slip through a gap. It was probably just missed amongst the tracking of all these collectibles, but frustrating nonetheless. I would have had this Platinum trophy much sooner had I not fell foul here.

Overall, I'd probably put this roughly on par with Dishonored in terms of difficulty. Both trophy lists are very similar and there are many parallels to draw upon across both lists. 

The experience I carried over from Dishonored certainly helped with the forward planning for this game, ensuring I could earn the Platinum in a much more logically thought out manner and within less playthroughs too, despite having to put in a bit of extra time due to a slight oversight with the collectibles.

The game itself does not require you to play on a specific difficulty setting for any of it's trophies, meaning you can tackle these challenges freely to your own preferences. I chose hard difficulty for both main playthroughs and still didn't notice many difficult parts of the game. When you're striving to not be seen or kill anyone, avoiding combat will naturally dampen the difficulty anyway, and you're less likely to notice any spikes in challenge regardless.

I've put it just a notch below Dishonored, just for the simple reason of being able to come into this with enough experience to plan more appropriately and tackle the list with a better equipped knowledge of what to expect from a game that carries much of it's ideas over from the original. It's a shame that I had to speedrun a third playthrough, but this didn't put me out too much, and probably wasn't enough to bring the overall score up.

Notable Trophies -

Clean Hands - Complete the game without killing anyone.

Hardest Trophy -

Clean Hands

Complete the game without killing anyone

DLC #226 - Hitman 3 - Hitman 2 Expansion

If you argued the point that the way to make Hitman 2 better was to just add more of it, I personally wouldn't object - and that's exactly what they did.

This expansion adds 2 new Sniper Assassin missions - The Pen and the Sword and Crime and Punishment. It also adds another 2 regular Assassin missions - Golden Handshake and The Last Resort.

The locations are nicely varied, as always, with the Sniper Assassin missions taking you to Siberia and Singapore, and the regular Assassin missions taking you to New York City and The Maldives, all with a plethora of new targets to go after.

Due to the fact that this is an expansion of the previously reviewed Hitman 2 DLC content, there isn't much to really expand on here in terms of gameplay features. These levels encompass more of the same unchanged fundamentals, and there isn't any further development to the level design or gameplay features worth noting, if any at all. It is a classic case of more of the same.

The variety comes from the different locations and the variation of mechanics to eliminate your targets depending on the environment around you, which has always been Hitman's ace card.

In terms of trophies, this packages adds a further 10 trophies to the list, and covers off the 4 new missions outlined above.

Simply beating this selection of missions in any capacity, regardless of score and rating, will earn you 4 of these trophies, but as before, there are requirements covered elsewhere that mean you're going to need to perfect your methods of mission completion if you want every trophy on offer.

The level mastery trophies continue and 2 of these are awarded for mastering New York and Haven Island to level 20. The requirements for this are unchanged, and simply involve replaying the level and ticking off the various feats/challenges until you've fulfilled enough to reach level 20. This will involve completing the vast majority of them, and these requirements are still designed to get maximum replayability out of these missions. No real surprises.

The Sniper Assassin missions are where the remaining trophies are focused, and whilst the previous DLC pack only briefly sampled this mode, this DLC expands on them through these final assortment of trophies.

For each of the 2 new Sniper Assassin missions, you'll need to accumulate a score of 1,000,000 points for each, as well as beat all challenges and feats too. The challenges and feats follow the same concept as level mastery, though a level mastery score doesn't exist in Sniper Assassin missions in the same way it does for regular ones. However, these trophies leave no margin for vacancy, and will require you to beat all of them to unlock the trophy. Some of the challenges are either redacted or have cryptic requirements, and set up scenarios that can only occur once you fulfil specific actions beforehand, meaning they do actually have a much deeper logical methodology than you may think at face value.

I didn't touch much on the Sniper Assassin missions in the last DLC pack, because they didn't require much exploration beyond just beating them, but the trophies demand you delve deeper this time round. When you consider the fact you'll sit still in one place for the entire mission, and have 15 minutes to complete the contract, it actually contains alot of depth, full of objectives that demand critical thinking. The gameplay mechanics also integrate creative ways to make use of the sniper too. Shoot locks off doors to expose a crucial object or open something. Shoot objects to reveal something behind them. Shoot a button to trigger something to start up or move. Shoot something to create an execution hazard. I thought the creativity was the most obvious standout thing about this mode, but that's hardly surprising is it?

Admittedly, I did have to look a small handful of these challenges up, mainly the ones with redacted requirements. I gave it an honest go, but I knew they'd be so cryptic, I'd waste too much time trying to figure them out myself. 

Achieving the trophies for scoring 1,000,000 points for the level were much more satisfying for me, and this will require you to clear all objectives quickly and without causing any alerts. There are optimal ways to do this, and it was good fun figuring these out in steps and then linking it all together - making judgement calls on movement patterns, points of interest on the map where you could hide bodies and finally putting it all together to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible to earn 1,000,000 points - Which is the threshold for a Silent Assassin rating.

The trophies are very thorough and require you to master each level, and you'll need to play them through multiple times to earn all the trophies in this set. This won't be an issue through practice and patience - 2 classic ingredients of Hitman success - but you'll need to prove your competency if you want to unlock everything on offer.

Platinum #151 - Balatro

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 8/10

If you look back to the 2024 Game of the Year nominees, you'll notice Balatro with a place at this table. A solo-developed game which spent just under 3 years in production and completely took a grip of the gaming world through it's intriguing twist on Poker.

How could a Poker Roguelike possibly be intriguing enough to be considered for Game of the Year contention? Pretty easily, as it goes.

Balatro is a deckbuilding game where you play common poker hands using various methods of scoring in order to beat a target score per round. The base game offers 8 antes, each consisting of a small blind, big blind and boss blind - with the boss blind of ante 8 concluding the run. You can play into endless mode should you wish to continue and see how far your deck can stretch into end game.

Each round will increase the target score and thus, your ability to keep up with the blinds and successfully surpass them is necessary, otherwise, it's game over.

You can achieve scoring in multiple ways. Cards can be enhanced with bonuses earned from opening packs in the shop and poker hands can be levelled up by acquiring planet cards in similar fashion. However, the jewel in the crown are the range of Jokers you'll have at your disposal - All giving different perks and benefits that can be combined together to create interesting synergy's and combinations to send your score through the roof.

This is the allure of Balatro. Even right up to the point of achieving the Platinum trophy, I was still discovering interesting combinations of Jokers that ensured the game remained fresh throughout the entire time I spent with it. Sure, you naturally lean towards favourites, and there are certain combinations that you'll actively strive for (Everyone is looking at you "Photochad"...) but the beauty of this game is that is also encapsulates another crucial factor. Luck.

To a lesser or greater extent, your runs will be made or broken by luck. Whether it's praying to see that final discard provide the card you need to keep a run alive, or simply what you find in the shop between rounds to help improve your run, luck stays true to the marriage that comes with casino-based card games and how the hands are dealt will always be a factor on making or breaking your progress. Every agonising miss and long shot that hits is a "one more game" rush that seldom exists in many games, and it had me completely hooked.

The pixel art graphics with every playing card and Joker carefully hand-drawn to give it's unique look. The swirling metallic coloured theme of the game interface. The catchy but equally soothing tones in the background. The replayability, variations in how your game can play out, the subtle adjustments to difficulty as you rise through the stakes. I genuinely can't pick any flaws with it and it is worthy of every breath drawn in a Game of the Year conversation. It's one of my favourite games of all time.

I wouldn't even go as far to suggest you need to be an avid Poker player to master Balatro. The game's allure is the Roguelike element, and the easy pick up and play nature is the real star of the show here. If you want the scope to be seriously good, then that exists too, and as long as you have a knack for logic, you will almost certainly enjoy what's on offer.

In terms of trophies, this is a medium sized list, consisting of 32 trophies, including the Platinum trophy. Strap in, because you're in this one for the long haul.

The trophy list does a good job of luring you in a bit here, giving you a solid amount of trophies for little effort initially. It also rewards maximum exploration of the game, with trophies also awarded for discovering every Joker, which requires you to find or purchase it for the first time in the shop between rounds. These trophies also apply to Planet cards, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and Vouchers, all of which award their own trophy for discovering each type of shop bonus. These will all certainly come naturally as you focus on 2 primary tasks this list demands of you.

The "Completionist+" trophy, awarded for Winning with every deck on Gold stake difficulty, is the first major task of this trophy list.

Before you start a run, you'll be asked to choose a deck. Each deck comes with it's own gameplay variation that shakes up the challenge a little bit and you'll eventually unlock access to 15 decks in total for which you need to reach Gold stake difficulty for this trophy. In a similar fashion, you'll also need to progress on lower coloured stake difficulties in order to climb up and access Gold stake, which is the highest tier. There are 8 coloured difficulty stakes which twist the game with certain rules, and having to win on Gold stake for all decks requires you to win a minimum of 120 runs in total.

Most of the decks are fairly basic and easy to understand, and some will force you to change the way you play and make you more tactful about the Jokers you select, but the true curveball here comes from the stake difficulty.

Each of the 8 stake difficulties will add an extra complexity that stacks, so by the time you reach Gold stake, there are a number of different modifiers combining that you need to account for when attempting to win a run. Green and Purple stake increase the score requirements to pass an ante, Blue stake permanently removes a discard, Black stake adds Eternal Jokers - which cannot be sold once active - and Orange stake adds Perishable Jokers, which are permanently disabled after 5 rounds only.

By the time you come to tackling each of the 15 decks on Gold stake, you're really up against it, and you'll need to draw on every tactic you've learned to succeed in runs. I would say this trophy starts to get difficult at the introduction of Eternal Jokers at Black stake, which is still 4 difficulty colours off Gold. Eternal and Perishable Jokers will unsettle your familiarity with certain Jokers you can generally rely on, and sometimes you'll be forced into decisions you don't necessarily want to make which you only find out later on with hindsight weren't correct.

Gold stake difficulty also reminds you of how brutal some of the boss blinds are. The Needle - which reduces your hands playable to just 1. The Flint - which halves your base scoring. The Wall - which doubles the normal target score. Just a small selection of bosses you don't want to see at later antes in runs on Gold stake difficulty. If I ever lost a high stake run, it would be because of seeing a certain boss blind I didn't want to see.

On good days, I could win up to 5 or 6 runs. On bad days, I could play a good 10 hours without getting anywhere close. It has brutally fine margins of success and that spectrum of variance was often a good reminder of this and how big of a role luck can play in your levels of prosperity. Sometimes, the cards just don't fall your way.

The game doesn't really offer much extensive stat tracking. Each successful run will generally take around 30-40 minutes, and to win 120 runs, this trophy requires a minimum of 80 hours of playtime. When you take into account all the failures in between, I would say this trophy eclipsed 300-400 hours easily - Possibly more. That sounds inconceivable until you see how much time I plugged into this game when all was said and done, and I finally unlocked this trophy just after a year of playing Balatro religiously at least twice a week. To think too, this was only half the battle.

Before moving onto the second major task in this trophy list, I broke away to tackle the Challenge mode. This lines up 20 unique challenges with set parameters you need to progress through to complete a full run, and awards a Gold trophy for beating all 20.

There are a couple of tricky challenges, but they're all defaulted to White stake difficulty, which pales in comparison after tackling every single deck on Gold stake, so this was more a nice little palette cleanser than anything else. The final challenge requires you to win a run without being able to use a single Joker, which took me a handful of attempts, but this was a stroll in the park comparatively, and before I knew it, the second big task lay ahead.

The "Completionist++" trophy, awarded for Earning a Gold Sticker on every Joker, is the second main part to this trophy list, and is arguably even more challenging than part 1.

Each time you complete a run to ante 8, the Jokers you're holding in hand at the end of the run will earn a sticker according to the colour of stake you've just beaten, and you'll need to beat a Gold stake run with every single Joker in the game, of which there are 150.

If you've completed the previous trophy, you'll already have a small handful of these Jokers with a Gold sticker attached to them, so there is a headstart in place, but there are a number of complications to consider with this trophy.

Firstly, in terms of strategy, I initially opted to complete this task using the Anaglyph deck. This deck gives you a free Double Tag for each Boss blind you defeat, with the idea behind the strategy being to continue to stack these double tags until you find a Negative tag at some point during your run. Taking the negative tag late on will trigger all the double tags and give you a bunch of negative Jokers to hold, maximising your chances of ticking off as many Jokers at the end of the run, should you win.

I ultimately didn't find this a viable approach, for two main reasons. Firstly, the negative skip tag isn't guaranteed to come, so the strategy is ultimately a bit too luck dependant to work frequently enough to be effective. Secondly, you don't have any control of the Jokers you choose. It'll just be as they come out of the shop and you have to select what you're given, which is also way too rigid for this strategy to be effective. So I did quickly pivot out of this tactic.

I settled on the Ghost deck instead, which starts you with a Hex Spectral card and adds the possibility of finding Spectral cards in the shop. I just wanted to lean on the power of Spectral cards to help me on Gold stake.

Since this is on Gold stake difficulty by default, you'll still run into the same issues of just being able to beat runs, as with the previous Completionist trophy, but for this particular task, you're trying to do this with forced Jokers that, in many instances, you wouldn't even rely on to win you a Gold stake run, which is a big problem.

For example, you need to be conscious of finding a way to "carry" certain Jokers;

• Seance. Gives you a Spectral card when you play a Straight Flush. 
• Matador. Gives you $8 each time the Boss blind ability is triggered. 
• 8 Ball. Gives a 1 in 4 chance of creating a Tarot card when an 8 is played.
• Diet Cola. Gives a free double tag when sold.
• Luchador. Disables the current boss blind when sold.
• Invisible Joker. Duplicates a random Joker in hand when sold.

These are just a small handful I would personally group into this category, but there are 2 different types of "carry" Joker. Seance, Matador and 8 Ball are just a few examples of Jokers whose benefits are just way too niche or ineffective, and will need a carry because they're just not good enough to positively impact a Gold stake run.

Diet Cola, Luchador and Invisible Joker are examples of Jokers whose benefits only kick in when they're sold, which is counter-productive towards the goals of this trophy, and effectively just makes them useless Jokers by default because they need to be held in hand right up until the end of the run. They're deadweight by nature.

I would usually focus on building a strong line-up of 4 Jokers and holding a free space to carry one of these through to the end. Holding out an extra Joker slot like this on Gold stake is killer, and it cost me numerous times, but it's the only way to Gold sticker the sort of Jokers like those mentioned above. Another benefit to the Ghost deck is seeing Ectoplasm Spectral cards, which make a Joker negative to the detriment of losing a hand. This can also be brutal, but slightly widens your scope for carrying Jokers.

Further to this, you also need to be aware of the food Jokers too. These are Jokers whose perk always leads to a perishable consequence, and are timed to expire within a certain amount of hands played. There are 7 that fit into this category, including Ice Cream, Popcorn, Ramen, Turtle Bean, Seltzer, Gros Michel and Cavendish.

Timing is really important with these Jokers. You need them to appear, mostly, towards the end of your run, and taking them too early means they simply won't get far enough for you to win holding them. Due to their expirable nature, they'll never have an Eternal sticker either, so you need loads of luck in seeing them late on into runs to grab them at the optimal time so they're still in play by the end. Also, apart from Cavendish and Ramen, all these Jokers offer fairly weak benefits late into a Gold stake run when the scoring requirements are high, so they also mainly fall into the carry category too.

I would also hold a spare slot for these Jokers, in the exact same approach I took for those I deemed to be carry Jokers too. They'll offer some scoring, but generally won't influence the outcome of a Gold stake run too much. It's also important to note that you won't see Cavendish unless you've seen a Gros Michel expire in your hands before, within the same run.

A final consideration, and something that rears it's head time and time again as a conspiring factor. Luck. You'll reach that point where you only need 10 Jokers so be prepared for runs where you won't even see the Jokers you need appear. I put together plenty of solid winning runs, only to draw a blank on finding the Jokers I needed just by simple virtue of the fact the pool was so shallow. 

The Overstock and Overstock Plus vouchers will help here. They add an extra slot to the shop shelf per round and every re-roll. Similarly, the Re-Roll Surplus and Re-Roll Glut vouchers will make shop re-rolls cheaper, giving you more opportunities to spin for the Jokers you need. However, luck will play it's part here too, and you need to hope you see these vouchers available for purchase. It's unlikely you'll encounter all 4 in the same run so make the most of them if you see them. Shout out to the final Joker I needed. The Stone Joker - Which evaded me for over a week of hard pushing for this final Joker and gave me my very first feeling of burnout with this game.

I thought winning 120 different runs for the first trophy was tough enough, and this trophy was even tougher. Having to steer away from preferred builds and favourite Jokers is a tough adjustment, and some Jokers are so weak, it puts you at an uncomfortable disadvantage. I found this trophy to be the tougher out of the two, and it also took me much longer to achieve. The failure rate was way higher and it also made me commit to some rash decisions too. I'd sometimes get greedy and see a Joker I needed a Gold sticker for late in a run and taking the gamble to sell a solid Joker and risk the carry was something that rarely paid off.

According to the dashboard on the Playstation interface, I put 857 hours into Balatro. That's almost 36 days of my entire life. That does blow my mind a little bit, but I'm not that surprised when I reflect on this properly. This game took days away from me at regular intervals, and it's rare for games to grip me to that extent.

It is a tough Platinum, and you'll need to commit to it fully. The game purposely builds the difficulty to a point where it'll reward those who have learned to master it most, whilst maintaining some cutthroat doses of luck that'll speedbump you, just to remind you that you won't have it your own way, no matter how good you become. I would strongly endorse this as a 9/10, but the sheer enjoyment I got from this game from start to finish shaves a mark off the final difficulty rating. Very clearly one of the most enjoyably long-winded games I've ever played. It balances this longevity with a Platinum that requires critical thinking, intuition and luck - and it was an absolute pleasure.

Notable Trophies - 

Completionist+ - Win with every deck on Gold Stake difficulty.
Completionist++ - Earn a Gold Sticker on every Joker.

Hardest Trophy -

Completionist++

Earn a Gold Sticker on every Joker