Let me take you back to the year 2010, when I had come to Japan for the first time as an exchange student on my Japanese language course. While at the university I met a girl who had a fairly deep interest in slot machines. I saw her once sitting in the communal study space reading a magazine and when I asked her what she was reading it turned out to be a strategy guide (?) for a recently published Evangelion themed slot machine. The magazine outlined how the machine was played along with how to trigger its various modes and even had these big ass diagrams of the reels. After a short conversation about it I tagged along with her to the local Pachislot place where I gave it a try for myself. I got 5000 yens worth of tokens, took a few spins of the machine and within about 20 minutes all my money had gone. I wasn't expecting to win and I wasn't expecting to play for a significantly long amount of time but I was expecting to at least get a bit more than 20 fucking minutes. In that moment I vowed never to play slots again and left the place.
But the truth is I don't actually hate slot machines, I hate losing large sums of money in small amounts of time so when you tell me that I can play fakey rougelike video game slots with no risk to my families financial situation I'm fucking all in on that one.
Cloverpit on its surface is a very simple game. You are locked in a small, somewhat Saw-esque room, with a mini slot machine and an ATM. The ATM tells you that you have to pay it a certain amount of coins within a certain amount of rounds or you get ejected into the abyss below. If you pay the coins then your debt goes up and you do it again until you either win a key from the game master or the debt gets too high to clear and you fall to your doom. That by itself would only be fun for a few tries but Cloverpit mixes things up by giving you trinkets that can modify your luck or modify the value of things on the machine greatly and now you get the true addicting quality of the game. Not only are you pulling the literal slot machine but you are also pulling the trinket machine and when you get that pefect mix of items and circumstances that make one value on the reels super high and then you manage to finesse your way into an insane jackpot and that rush is basically unmatched. It gives the game a real "just one more run" quality where a failed run can be frustrating but then "if only I had gotten <trinket> that time" and so you play again hoping to get your ideal setup. Couple that with an additional phone mechanic where every round a mysterious caller gives you a chance to change things like the value of things in the machine or give you free shots at rerolling trinkets and all the moving parts make for a truly compelling experience.
On top of all that Cloverpit offers a number of challenges to keep you spinning for hours and hours. The game has a number of endings that can be achieved by fulfilling a number of conditions that amount to the gambling equivalent of self-harm and the game reaches Kaiji levels of fever pitch when you have these conditions active. Not only that but you can also activate a number of "memory cards" which are like special challenge modes that make you rethink your approach to the machine and your trinkets.
There's just no better feeling in the world than when you're behind on tokens, its the last few spins of your final round, you have a high value mark on the machine but you just cant get it to come out. Then you hit the lever, your luck trinkets all pop at once, the reels line up and the machine goes apeshit as your high value marking hits a jackpot, you go from guaranteed death to two more rounds of safety instantly, absolute euphoria. Thank god these developers only made a fakey video game slot machine because if you hired them to make a real one then there might be a lot more people filing for bankruptcy in the world.
BUT THATS NOT ALL
Scratch cards were also a thing I quite enjoyed in my student days. I'd grab one whenever I did my grocery shopping and just the act of winning a fiver would get me giddy for the whole day. So when I saw an incremental game based around doing scratch cards I had to buy it right away.
In Scritchy Scratchy you are trying to avoid your shitty dish washing job by winning at scratch cards. If it was just that it would be kind of bullshit but there are upgrades for you to buy that allow you to manipulate your luck and win more consistently. From there you buy more expensive cards that have higher payouts to increse your luck to repeat this cycle seemingly ad-infinitum. Eventually you are granted the ability to buy a "final ticket". You scratch it, lose and it causes you to die.
From here you get another upgrade system that allows you to manipulate your luck and payouts even further and you keep scratching cards and unlocking more stuff until eventually you win that final ticket and I will not spoil in this post. It's a simple little incremental game with a theme that appeals very specifically to my vices that also doesn't overstay its welcome and has the good sense to roll credits just as its getting obnoxious. A lesson that a game like Cookie Clicker could really benefit from. If potentially life ruining bits of cardboard appeal to you as much as they appeal to me but you don't actually want to financially cripple yourself, Scritchy Scratchy is a game that you should grab off Steam ASAP.
The reason I say I have a gambling "issue" rather than a gambling "problem" is because, thankfully, my weird urge to gamble can be completely satiated by games like this. I think I owe a debt of gratitude to things like Cloverpit, Scritchy Scratchy and the Yakuza series casino (to name one example) for allowing me to indulge in the thrill of the game without any of the real consequences that would send me down a potentially very dark path. Even if you aren't weirdly tempted by the casino lifestyle like I am though, these two games are very good and you should grab them anyway
LETS GO GAMBLING
