Balatro

Balatro

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Gyga Apr 6, 2024 @ 11:57pm
High Contrast Mode and Colorblindness
I'm a new Balatro player (I got the game a couple days ago now) and I've been loving it. I've already sunk in over a dozen hours and won four or five times. This is an incredibly well designed game in nearly every regard and I wanted to bring up here my *only* complaint

I have red-green colorblindness—the most common type in the world. Next to nothing in the game is affected by this. There are only two things that trip me up, and they're both very easily solved

Suits, of course, are all different colors in this game to add an extra distinguishing feature between them. Spades and clubs are very similar colors to me by default. The high contrast mode does a wonderful job at changing clubs to an easily visible blue. Yet, diamonds and hearts, I mix up all the time

Obviously, I could just use the shapes to distinguish these problematic suits. And plus, it says their name when you hover over them. But when I'm in the zone, I'm not thinking about that. I just match things that look like they match when I want to make a flush. So many times, I've slipped up and threw in a diamond when the order calls for hearts

The other thing: seals. Gold is distinguished well from red by its brighter color and shining effect. However, I have to look at the tooltip for blue and purple every single time. No matter how much I play, I will never be able to tell the difference between a blue and purple seal without it

My suggestion would be adjust high contrast mode into, or add, a fully fledged colorblind mode (and it might be nice to include different color schemes for the other types of colorblindness as well)

I think that for my type of colorblindness, the diamond suit would be much easier to see if it was more yellow. Slightly brighter and much less red. I think it's leaning toward orange-ish right now? I'm not too sure, but it's easy to mix up with the red of the hearts

As for seals, I would suggest adding effects like the gold seal, maybe just some sort of holographic effect to the purple seal would help. Also, making the blue seal a lighter cyan, while going with more of a pinkish magenta with the purple seal, would be easier to distinguish

I hope this is seen and gets considered. Other people also seem to think that the high contrast mode is underwhelming. As minor as it really is, these changes would go a long way for my experience with the game as well as the countless other colorblind players out there
Date Posted: Apr 6, 2024 @ 11:57pm
Posts: 0