Cloverpit

When was the last time you stood in front of a one-armed bandit, inserted a banknote and felt that magnetic pull as the lights flashed and the wheels spun? Maybe never, maybe in a dodgy hotel in southern Europe where the machine smelled of cigarettes and cheap plastic. Either way, everyone instinctively knows why it's called a one-armed bandit. It's built to rob you - ruthlessly. And this is exactly where Cloverpit begins: in the dirty little room where you're stuck with a slot machine, a red phone, a broken toilet and a deposit machine that seems to sneer every time you top it up with more money. Beneath your feet, a trapdoor that leads straight down into the darkness, an abyss that gapes and waits to get you when you fail. It's a set-up so simple you almost laugh at it, but ingenious at the same time. Because you know from the very first spin what's at stake: everything.

The premise is as straightforward as it is sadistic. You owe the gambling devil a debt, and it grows with every round you play. Three rounds to pay it back, fail and the door opens and you fall. Do you succeed? Well, congratulations. Then just grit your teeth, because the debt grows to the next level and the devil on the other side of the phone line ups the stakes. And speaking of the phone - the red handset rings after a successful round and gives you three choices: maybe double the value of lemons, increase the odds of seals, or do something else obscure that changes the DNA of the whole machine. All this is interspersed with a little kiosk where you can buy amulets: a green chilli that buffers your luck, a holy bible that saves you from three sixes (666 - more or less death in Cloverpit, of course) or other strange little gadgets that slowly but surely build your own personal slot machine meta. It's at once brilliant and hopelessly addictive, a system in which each run is unique but always rests on the same, obvious foundation: pull the lever, and you're good to go.

You can't play Cloverpit without drawing parallels to Balatro, the poker rougelite that basically brought the whole sub-genre to life. Without LocalThunk, Cloverpit would probably never have existed, we can be honest about that. But this is no pale imitation, it's a sibling that has chosen a completely different path. Where Balatro is built on the mathematical elegance of the poker hand, Cloverpit is built on the brutal heart of chance. Multiplications, combinations, increased values and random effects underpin both games - but where Balatro evokes the feeling of building a finely calibrated deck of cards, Cloverpit feels like standing on the casino floor with a bucket of coins and a fool's hope that the jackpot lights will start flashing with frenzy. It's dirty, intense and somehow strangely purer in its evil.

It's also an FPS. Yes, it sounds weird, but it's true. You walk around in that claustrophobic cell, smelling of mould and desperation, and you have to make little choices all the time. It's not a lot of leeway, but enough to make you feel trapped, confined and watched. The broken toilet stands there, glaring at you like a silent witness, ready to swallow your sorrows, literally. Every time you do something - buy an amulet, answer the phone, play the machine - your own little tragedy slowly builds. And with each round, you realise that it's not a question of if you will die, but when.

And die you do. Often. But every death also means progress, because it's a roguelite, and every failure unlocks new items, new combinations, new ways to manipulate the machine. That first jackpot feels like a personal victory, almost like cheating the system, even though deep down you know the house always wins. Perhaps that's the greatest achievement of Cloverpit: that it manages to make you want to keep going, even when you know losing is a foregone conclusion. That it manages to give you small wins that feel monumental in the moment, even though they only lead to even bigger debts. It's almost poetic in its cynicism.

The graphics are a clear flirtation with the retro aesthetic. Coarse pixels, dirty colours, a design that walks the line between charmingly ugly and deliberately stylish. There's a claustrophobic, almost oppressive atmosphere in the room that's reinforced by the soundscape: the grinding of the machine, the clinking of coins, the sudden ring of the phone. It's simple, but it works, and the atmosphere carries the whole game more than any story ever could. Because there is a story, about why you're there, who's locked you in, what's waiting outside. But it's more scenery than anything else, a vague excuse to build that sweaty sense of entrapment. The big story is really just the same as in any casino: you, against chance.

Not everything is perfect, though. The texts describing charms and effects are initially completely incomprehensible. Stacked numbers, percentages and terms that feel like some kind of internal code language. Understandable, sure - the game is based on maths - but it wouldn't have hurt to have a slightly smoother learning curve. This is where the game loses out, because it becomes more frustrating than mysterious when you don't understand what a new thing actually does. I don't mind feeling stupid in games, but I want at least a chance to pretend to understand.

And then there was the horror element. The game is claimed (by some ) to be a horror game, but that's a stretch. Sure, it's dark, creepy, claustrophobic and clearly dirty, but Cloverpit is more satire than horror. More commentary on gambling addiction, capitalism and this whole perpetual machine we call modern entertainment than anything else. And it works. The satire is raw, but it's also funny, almost painfully accurate. It makes you laugh at the absurdity of feeding money into a machine, even though you know that this is exactly how the world looks sometimes.

I like Cloverpit, I really do. It's not a perfect game, it's not even a particularly fair game, but it's a deeply entertaining one. It takes the simplicity of a slot machine and turns it into a dance of death, a constant battle against chance and your own impulses. It's not as polished or addictive as Balatro, but it still hits something fundamental in the gambling brain: the feeling that the next spin could be the one that changes everything. And even if it never does, even if you know the machine is rigged from the start, you sit there and draw again. And again. And again.

Cloverpit is a game you shouldn't play, but you can't stop playing. And that, my friends, is probably the most accurate review you can give a game that is about never really being able to stop.