Few things will make you mad at a game quite like trying to take on its most extreme challenges. Eons ago I tried to learn how to speedrun EarthBound. It was awful. Speedrunning EarthBound is simply not fun. God help you if you try to go for a good time; every category has been so severely murdered that [insert edgy joke here with a punchline like Emmett Till or Casey Anthony's kids or whatever here that will make people so mad at me that I will become more popular than Jesus because everyone will read all my socials waiting for me to say something even more unhinged]. And so it has gone with Balatro.
If somehow you are a video game fan and have not heard of Balatro, ask the rock you've been living under about it or something. Balatro is a roguelike incarnation of poker. You form poker hands to score points. Score enough points and you beat the round. Between rounds there is a shop where you can spend your (in-game) money on Jokers that add various abilities or increase your scoring capabilities; or a variety of other buffs, whether that be "planet cards" that improve the basic score of each hand, or even things that can modify your deck by adding enhancements to cards or changing what cards are in your poker deck. With some of these you can do deeply silly things like play five of a kind - otherwise not a real poker hand, but worth shitloads of points because it is intended to be hard to do. Although the complexity cap is insanely high, Balatro is at its heart such a simple game that you could probably figure out what the deal is just from my most basic description. It's a game that's almost "primordial" (which is certainly how I've described it). It hooks the player with simple-to-understand gameplay and the fact that it's a very easy game to pick up and put down. The basics of poker are practicallyh imprinted on most of us here in America as just this major part of our culture. Most of us know what a basic deck of playing cards consists of, and you can probably name no small proportion of basic poker hands right off the top of your head.
Balatro offers many variant decks that serve as your "character" choices like you'd get in most roguelikes, and several difficulty level options. There are also many challenges available where you get the most basic deck you can get, occasioually with a few customizaitons, and a set of items you're locked into. Jokerless is the final challenge in the game. It made me very, very unhappy. It's quite possibly the hardest challenge I've ever faced in a video game.
Beyond this point, I will assume you are familiar with Balatro. If you aren't, this'll probably be complete nonsense.
Jokerless is exactly what you think it is. Previous challenges often had cutesy or referential names, but once you get to the end, two challenges just don't mess around anymore - "Cruelty" (no basic payout for small or large blind, only three joker slots - less scary than it sounds because you have white stake score thresholds still) and this one. In Jokerless, you just don't get jokers. At all. You have zero joker slots to start with. The shop doesn't spawn jokers or Buffoon Packs. The Judgement tarot card doesn't show up. You can't get Buffoon or Top-Up tags, nor any of the five tags that affect the next joker to spawn in the shop (because it would be pointless). Wraith cards don't appear in boosters. Antimatter doesn't spawn. You. Do. Not. Get. Any. Jokers. You just have to win on the strength of your hands. Planet cards become super-important. Don't rely on the High Priestess tarot card, though, it still seems to preternaturally just give you the least useful planets you could possibly get.
Before I discuss the challenge of this (which is extremely high), let's talk about the problems with this challenge. There's... a few. About six, if I counted correctly. See, diluting the card pool, we still have everything else that interacts with jokers. The Blank voucher remains in the rotation despite its absolute worthlessness. Tarot cards Wheel of Fortune and Temperance continue to exist, serving only to gunk the already-overcrowded Arcana Packs and shop, and be sold for $1 when you invariably end up with them from Emperor instead of something oh I don't know actually freakin' usable. Perhaps most gut-wrenching is the three (!!!) Spectral cards you can still pull that interact with jokers, making them useless and making opening Spectral Packs much more of a gamble - which is a shame because Spectral packs contain two cards in particular that ease this challenge significantly by enhancing one of the few viable hands for this mode (Four of a Kind) - Immolate and Trance (the latter of which is just powerful here no matter what you're playing). These choices were made for the express purpose of making the game harder, and nothing more. Of course, LocalThunk did think to remove the final bosses that affect only jokers - which is three out of five, leaving only two final boss options, both of which are extremely painful for this challenge.
Of course, Jokerless is already stupidly hard. (It's like removing one of a game's major mechanics and making players use the rest is not a great idea if you want things to be fun and not demonically, painfully hard! I understand difficulty; I even understand it at masochistic levels. This, however, is perhaps a step too far.) Nothing is really done to counterbalance the newfound tightness of the score thresholds you have to meet. This is true of some other challenges in theory, such as Cruelty, but what makes Cruelty so piss-easy by comparison is that these numbers are usually quite manageable as long as you can get something. In Jokerless, you only have planet cards - and that's a total crap-shoot, unless you get Telescope. You'll want that very early, but you can barely afford it - as usual. And even if you do get it, you have to contend with the fact that you have to keep that one hand your most-played... and the hands that can actually scale halfway decently are the ones that are hardest to play. I beat this challenge with straights; straights are a horrendously unreliable hand type that might even be clunkier than four of a kind (4oaK) even after deck fixing. That, of course, is why they scale so well; because they suck to play. 4oaK sucks to play for other reasons, but you can manipulate your deck around them way more than you can straights. Of the two, I suspect 4oaK is easier to deal with the final boss with because you have only two final boss options here: either the Violet Vessel (requires 300k total score to beat), or the Cerulean Bell (selects one card from your hand every ttime and forces you to use it, whether that's as a discard or a play).
So, you guessed it. This is all about luck. Which is absolutely infuriating; despite all the gags and the admittedly high amounts of RNG involved (big lucky card fan right here), Balatro is shockingly high on real decision-making. There's a lot of strategy and opportunity cost associated with choosing to level one hand over another, or picking this joker or that. No, in Jokerless, there are only a few strategies you can pick from, you all but cannot deviate from them once you start, and they are all more or less identical to each other once you get the ball rolling. This is why the final boss options are so vicious; if you have the Vessel, without extra hands, each hand must hit at least 75,000 points. Even if you get the Grabber and Nacho Tong, that puts your required average to 50k. This requires a hand somewhere in the ballpark of level 15. The thresholds are obviously much lower with the Cerulean Bell - 25k minimum average per hand with no hand-up vouchers, a little shy of 17k min average per hand with Nacho Tong - but you have to play around being forced to use a specific card. This can come at a bad time no matter what hand you're using if you're discarding to get to your winner, but it disrupts you little on the play if you're on 4oaK... and can just straight-up kill you if you're playing straights. It's a moment like this where you see that the game is missing something major: it really needs another final boss option.
All of this is assuming you even get to the final boss, though, because of course there's plenty more bullpucky in the way before that. Several of the main bosses are even worse - most notably the Flint (which will really test how much you've boosted your main hand's cards or if you're massively overleveled for the objective) and my longest-term enemy in Balatro full-stop, The Arm. Already a huge jerk of a boss to begin with, the Arm here becomes possibly the worst thing ever because hand levels are basically all you have. Imagine if there was a boss that just permanently took away jokers in the main game. That would be absolutely toxic. The Arm is the Jokerless equivalent of that. (Note to self: learn how to mod Balatro to make this a thing...)
Even fairly easy bosses can turn extremely problematic in Jokerless. The Mouth is one I died to a lot. Because you have to play a lot of very difficult-to-build hands to have even a snowball's chance in Hell of winning - and at the expense of everything else - I probably died at Ante 2-3 Mouths more than anything in all my attempts at the challenge. The Eye kind of sucks for other reasons, but if you can just level your winning hand high enough to one-shot the boss, you're as good as gold. The Hook is a weird one; sometimes it becomes quite a bit easier, like if you draw a hand with absolutely nothing for your main hand (easy to do once you choose a target value for 4oaK to go for, e.g. while you're in the midst of turning your entire deck into aces), letting you turn your extra hands into 7-card discards. Other times, you will run out your discards and not be ready... and then you're as good as dead. Additionally, steel cards and blue seals basically become worthless with the Hook due to the very high chance they will just get pitched when you play your winning hand.
I struggled a lot with this. I yelled at my computer an embarrassing amount of times. I rage-quit repeatedly. I will never do this again (sorry, Switch version, you're going to just have to deal with never being complete). I feel neither pride nor accomplishment in getting through all those RNG gates. Mostly I'm just annoyed. Annoyed at a game I quite like.
I'll obviously play it again at some point, possibly even later today. But until then, I think I've well and truly earned a break from Balatro because thinking about it is hurting my head.
Or to put it more simply, "Don't do this to yourself."
This is the hardest challenge I've ever done in a video game. It gave me no reward except an achievement.