While The Game Awards nominations have heavily favoured big hitters like Metaphor: ReFantazio, Astro Bot, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth—the latter two of which are notably not on PC, boo—one indie game is standing among the bigger players: Balatro.
LocalThunk's fantastic poker roguelite has secured five nominations: Best game direction, best independent game, best debut indie game, best mobile game, and the coveted Game of the Year award. That's the same number of nominations as Black Myth: Wukong, and one more nomination than Shadow of the Erdtree received.
Regardless of how things turn out when The Game Awards air on December 12, it feels like a pretty huge win. LocalThunk seems to think as much too, taking to Bluesky to say: "Crazy crazy day, so many messages of love and support from amazing people I have had the pleasure to meet these past couple years. In total disbelief".
He also penned a pretty darn heartfelt message in the Balatro subreddit—it's a humble post, mostly spotlighting the community and other games brewing in the indie scene rather than focusing too hard on his own success. "I wanted to thank all of you wonderful people for giving my game a shot and celebrating the unbelievable 5 Game Award nominations for Balatro with me," LocalThunk wrote. "It's been a really surreal day."
A message to the community from r/balatro
He continued: "One of the things I've learned this past year is how kind and supportive the indie dev community is. We all know how hard this industry can be and help each other where we can, and I've met so many amazing people that love what they do and the people they work with."
LocalThunk said he felt "uncomfortable treating the nominations and awards for Balatro as 'my' awards or nominations," adding: "I feel like my game just happens to be the current face of this beautiful and passionate corner of the industry. I just happen to be the lucky one to be propped up."
The post wraps up with some recommendations for "a few games that didn't get consideration" including Animal Well, Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, Billionaire and Arco, before finishing with the line: "Go support an indie!!"
It's real nice to see LocalThunk's humility and desire to use his platform to lift up other developers and their games. Ultimately, I'm just jazzed to see Balatro getting its much-deserved flowers—the game utterly took over the lives of the PC Gamer team when it released in February, and our Slack channel still gets the odd "big number" screenshot or video dropped in there. In a year that's been undeniably weird for games—no all-dominating big-budget release, lots of games that should have been hits but ultimately fell into obscurity—I'm glad to see so much love being shown to such a neat creation.
