Pool of Madness gives pool the Balatro treatment
Cynic that I am, I suspect this is a third-order Balatro derivative: another “[traditional game] roguelike” of the sort we’ve already seen a distressing number of. The simplicity of this foundation annoys me slightly because it quite often works, which feels like cheating, but I must concede that traditional games have the benefit of at least a few hundred years’ playtesting, and Pool of Madness bolts on such a broad range of additions that nobody could accuse it of merely coasting on prior art.
It’s pool, of course, but cursed: you play in some sort of haunted pirate ship beset by ghostly tentacled horrors, each game is badged as a ritual, and blood gushes from the pockets after each successful round. The act of playing borrows little more from actual pool than the act of pointing a cue: you just have to pot a small number of balls, not in sequence (or at least, not in the demo); potting the cueball just spits it back onto the table; you can stop it dead at any point during play and each ritual ends with the option to buy upgrades from a device that looks like if Bioshock had