Was CloverPit Supposed To Be The Next Balatro? | CloverPit Review

Casino Roguelites have gained popularity in recent years. The outstanding success of Balatro in 2024 has spurred the evolution of games taking inspiration from slot machines and dice games. Games like Dicey Dungeons, Slots & Daggers, and Buckshot Roulette have been popular releases, and even more games are coming in the future with upcoming releases like Raccion and Black Jacket. But today, we’re not talking about any of those; we’re talking about CloverPit.

CloverPit is another game that aims at the gambling urge and morphs it into a literal death game where you must win big or die trying. Quoted as a “demonic lovechild of Balatro and Buckshot Roulette,” you are locked in a cell, forced to rely on a slot machine for life. Pay off your ever-rising debt or fall into the never-ending depths.

The Slot Machine

Starting with just a slot machine, you will have to cash out enough money to pay off your ever-growing debt, known as deadlines. You start every run with 30 coins, and need a total of 75 coins in three turns to survive the first deadline. If you pass, you will need 200 coins for the second deadline. Each deadline will raise your debt exponentially, so you will need to find ways to manipulate your payout. This is where charms come in. Let’s take a quick intermission to talk about the charm shop.

Charm Shop

Given three rounds per deadline, you have two options every time you walk up to the slot machine. One option will have seven spins and one ticket, while the other has only three spins but 2 tickets. 90% of the time, I push for more spins, but every round needs to be looked at strategically. Now that you have some tickets, take a look at the charm shop.

There are over 150 items, and even though most need to be unlocked through in-game actions, the starting ones are nothing to scoff at. For some low-cost starters, I like the peppers that trigger randomly and increase luck on your next spin. Luck is a critical stat that will increase the chances of finding a pattern. Each item falls along the normal rankings of common to ultra legendary, and its cost will reflect this. With the first deadline needing so little, I would even suggest using one round to get more tickets to push for a good three or four-cost item. 

There are two ways I look at charms. I see setup items and action items. Setup items help me prepare for large combos. Think Cat Food that gives an extra 2 spins, Stonks that increase your interest by 5%, and the Crowbar that gives 3 free restocks. 

More spins and free restocks might look far better than increasing your interest, but this is a strategy for the longrun. Deadline one might only earn three or four coins. It can seem useless to have Stonks, but with further deadlines, you can start earning hundreds of thousands of coins in interest. Pair this with the Lucky Cat charm that adds your interest after hitting 3 patterns, and you will be flying through deadlines. This can lead to a debate on whether you should pay off a deadline early or use all three rounds to get as much money as possible. 

When a deadline is in progress, a board next to the ATM will show a bonus if you finish the deadline on that round. This includes coins and tickets, but each round that passes, the ticket amount will decrease. So, do you pay off early and get tickets for a better charm, or wait to see how much money you can and go for a Mystery Pack?

There are so many nice charms that having only seven slots might be too few. Luckily, there are two ways to add more slots. The easiest would be the telephone prompt that grants you another charm slot, but we’re not to the telephone portion of the episode yet, so let’s just acknowledge it and loop back to the phone later. As you have probably already figured out, there are charms that increase your slot space. The Make Space charm will give you two charm slots, but since it takes one, you only get one bonus slot. I love this one, but it’s not even the best charm in this category! If you happen to come across Carboard House, you need to get it. It is a charm that doesn’t take up space, adds a charm slot, and can show up later on in your shop.

Moving on to what I categorize as action items, there are a bunch of different setups that you can play. You can focus on increasing the value of lower-valued symbols like the fruits. You can try to chain patterns to increase the value of the pattern itself. The game tells you to find charms with synergy to win, and trying out different combinations is part of the fun. 

Pairing the Little Star that gives a guaranteed an XL pattern if you didn’t score in the last turn, with the Pain Killers that, if only one pattern shows, upgrades it to the highest valued symbol works well if you can find an item to continually increase the value of the symbol like the golden modifier that increase the base value, or increase the pattern value like the Stain the increase pattern value every line a 4+ pattern is triggered. 

A lot of CloverPit players have also discovered that fruits are not only good for starving off scavey, but also for hitting your deadlines. I love the combination of the Fruit Basket that has fruits trigger an additional time, the Lucky Cat that adds your current interest when you trigger 3+ patterns, and one of the charms that increases the chance of a fruit showing up. This is a prime example of CloverPit’s draw, allowing you to make anything, even the least valuable symbol, worth focusing on in a run.

With so many charms, it can feel overwhelming. Do you prioritize getting spins and grab the Cat Food and Fake Coin? What about trying to increase the amount of interest you get each round, so you aim for Stonks and Grandma’s Purse? The best thing I have discovered is to just accept the setup the game is giving you. If you want to go for Lucky 7s, but the store is giving you clovers, take the clovers because they could help to unlock a good charm in the shop. The charm unlocks are tied to unlocking drawers, dying, getting out of the room, and using the charms. This is great because there’s no one right angle to win; you will have to try all strategies if you are going for 100%. 

Drawers

Now drawers are incredibly important, so let’s take a minute to touch on them. 

You’ve loaded up charms and are ready to go all in, but there are things you need to do before getting out of your prison. Step one is to open four drawers. All four keys will appear further down the line of deadlines in their own attempt. The drawers allow you to place one charm in each and pause the effect. I have used this while waiting for a limited-use charm to dissolve. 

The best part about the drawers is that they cost you nothing to deactivate or re-activate your charms. In a game where you have to pay for everything, this is a great way to avoid wasting your tickets.

The one downside is that charms have a shelf life. If you leave any charms in the drawers and die, they will turn into corpse parts. This might be disturbing, but this is actually a good thing if you want to see the light again. 

Once all the drawer keys are used, it will be swapped for the skull key. This is the key to your freedom. However, this is where the challenge amps up. You need to equip four corpse pieces and a skull. The skull is unlocked after getting your first corpse piece and will randomly show up in your shop. So, is the challenge getting all the pieces in the same run? Oh no no no. That might just be the easy part. Place four random charms in the drawers before you die, and you get the four corpse pieces. But, you have to equip them before the end of your first deadline, or else they dispose of themselves. Still not sounding like a super hard challenge? Well, each piece of this puzzle adds 5% to your debt. So, to get this skull key, your deadlines will be 25% higher than a normal run. 

I have had a run where I had enough coins to pay off my next two deadlines, and in addition to earning two Mystery Packs. The next deadline unlocked the skull key. Granted, this is for the bad ending, but an ending no less, and it does pop the “The Structor” achievement for escaping the room. 

Mystery Packs & Phone Calls

Now, what is a Mystery Pack, and how do you get one? When you complete a deadline and have enough coins to immediately pay off the next, the machine will prompt you with an offer: pay off the next deadline now, and you will receive a Mystery Pack. 

Inside will be three cards with a positive and a negative trait. Examples include: “Throughout the run, the store will only have 3 charms instead of 4. However, you’ll start every deadline with 2 free restocks.” and “666 has twice the normal appearance rate. Whenever you hit a jackpot, all coins lost to 666 during that round are refunded.” 

The main issue I have with these cards is that they are consumables. If you only have one copy of the card, use it and die on deadline one; you have used up that card and need to hope you get another copy in the next Mystery Pack. This makes 100%ing CloverPit incredibly challenging because one achievement is to turn all Mystery Cards rainbow holographic. And to do that, you must win with that card on hard mode. When the game launched, you needed to win three times on normal mode, and the card would level up each time, and end with it being rainbow holographic. In patch 1.2, this changed, and now you must beat normal mode with the card to turn it gold, and then beat it again on hard mode for rainbow. This has made the achievement, The Lord of the Pit, a lot more difficult due to doubling the amount for all deadlines. 

Moving on to the telephone. Every time you finish a deadline, the phone will ring and offer you three choices. The base phone will give you positive options, like increasing your charm slots by one. Red phone calls occur when you’ve hit a 666 on the last round. These have a positive paired with a negative, like double you coins, but set the tickets to zero. And one mode that you have to work some magic to get is the sacred phone. You reject three red phone calls, and on the fourth, the sacred phone will offer you powerful positive options, like increasing symbol multipliers by three. 

The phone options have made a run and should not be overlooked. There have been runs where it had the last pattern repeat twice, activating my Lucky Cat and making me rich, and there have been runs where nothing was good, and I didn’t pick anything. Just like everything else in this game, it comes down to RNG. 

The Verdict 

I enjoy a good run in this game, and I’ve gotten to the point where a bad run can be felt from the start. I have been able to strategize and reap the benefits of taking risks. Big numbers and super mega jackpots have given me dopamine rushes that I will never get because I feel no urge to go to a real casino and risk my real money. 

With no story and a challenge that people either destroy quickly or get hard-walled with, this seems like a game that people will either love or hate after about 10 hours. All of the achievements make this a challenge to figure out when to put it down and feel satisfied. I’ve made it out, but got the bad ending. I should just finish the game by getting the good ending, but so many of the achievements look fun to try and tackle. So, do I go for 100% completion? The one achievement that might kill me is the Lord of the Pit. I already have a tough time trying to clear stages as is, so having the requirement to beat them at double the deadline seems impossible to me. 

I do think this is a game that many people will play and love, but not complete. Like a lot of other games that give me arcade vibes with the pick up, play a round, and put down type of gameplay. I think this game has earned a solid four out of five stars. It has enough content to be satisfying and a difficulty curve that is identical for everyone. Because this is based on manipulating RNG, there is no actual strategy that you can implement. You can aim for certain items and perks, but those are also RNG-based, so each run will be different, and you can’t replicate a certain method. If you need that rush of dopamine a jackpot brings, but have no money because you spend it all on video games, jump onto CloverPit and save yourself from bankruptcy.