In what is likely a game’s most self-aware moment of 2025, at one point when answering the phone in CloverPitI was presented with the following question: Are you even having fun?

And while I have to admit that did initially get a small chuckle from me, it did give me pause for thought. Was I?

*Image: Panik Arcade / Future Friends Games*

Developer: Panik Arcade
Publisher: Future Friends Games
Release: 26 September 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 9,99€/$9.99/£8.49

If that question seems a little harsh, let’s not forget the game did ask, so let’s run with it. First, some context: at time of writing – though that might well be outdated before this article is live – Steam tells me that I’ve sunk just over twenty hours into CloverPit. During that period, I’ve beaten the game fifteen times, unlocked 153 of 160 available ‘Lucky Charms’ (the items that buff your slot machine), and completed all but two of the game’s Steam achievements – albeit the two that seem significantly more difficult than the others. Those numbers aren’t meant to be any sort of brag: just to say that at this point I’ve seen pretty much everything that this self-proclaimed ‘demonic lovechild of Balatro and Buckshot Roulette’ has to offer.

Longtime readers will be familiar with my apprehension surrounding one of those two ‘parent’ games: a year and a half after its release, Balatro has remained the game that I’ve avoided playing, lest Jimbo draws me in and I end up stuck grinding it out for hours on end. It does mean that, perhaps refreshingly for someone looking at CloverPit, I can’t really draw too many comparisons between the two, as I’ve continued to resist the urge to grab Balatro, even if it would allow me to get a better gauge on how CloverPit weighs up against its… uh, dad?

And speaking of gauge: briefly, onto… mum? Other dad?

If you had to guess who made CloverPit without any prior knowledge and based only on previous titles, you perhaps wouldn’t have gone for Panik Arcade, given that their previous game, Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, is – unsurprisingly, from the name – pretty far detached from the grime and gore found in the ‘Pit. Instead, Mike Klubnika, creator of Buckshot Roulette and, more recently, s.p.l.i.t. would’ve probably been a decent shout, and that inspiration is significant and obvious enough that Buckshot certainly earns its co-parenting credit.

I can see players going either way on it, but for me, that whole borrowed, grungy vibe added a lot to CloverPit – it could’ve been mechanically identical and set within a relaxed 2D environment and I think I’d have found it far less engaging. It’s never really scary or tense in the way that Buckshot Roulette can be – occasionally you have a small amount of time pressure as, without offering spoilers, there’s reasons you might need to move a few of those Lucky Charms around within a six-second window – but otherwise it’s offering an aesthetic rather than anything that’s actually going to scare you.

Perhaps I should quickly explain some gameplay, though if you weren’t already familiar with the game you could’ve probably figured it out from the footage you’ve seen so far. In CloverPit, you find yourself locked in a small room without so much as a bed to sleep on, with the main features instead being a slot machine and an ATM. At the start of each run you have a 75-coin debt, and three rounds of spins on said slot machine to earn enough to pay that debt. If you manage that before the deadline, your reward is another, significantly larger debt. That continues until you find a way to escape, or you can no longer afford what’s being asked of you: the latter being far more likely in your early playthroughs.

Even once you’ve started to learn how to manipulate the slot machine in your favour, the conditions of your escape are not immediately clear. Eventually though, once certain milestones are reached, your captor will offer you the key which unlocks the door, you’ll escape for your first time, and get one of the game’s two endings – or technically three, if we’re including falling down a pit to your demise.

In terms of endings where you don’t die, there’s the good and less-good options. Working out the second of those is fairly straight-forward, but I did find it slightly frustrating trying to figure out exactly what caused the key steps required for that better ending. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone reading who’d rather do the work themselves, so forgive my vagueness, but I could see something was happening, but the specifics of what made it occur were pretty opaque to me. Admittedly that’s almost certainly by design, and, had I grown really fed up with it, I could’ve easily looked it up – and if I’d struggled with it for much longer I probably would’ve. Cracking it myself did feel rewarding, though – in retrospect, once I got there it was probably the most gratifying experience I had with CloverPit, so I’d recommend trying to solve it yourself if you’re reading this having not played yet.

There’s a reasonable amount of replayability: we touched on CloverPit, among others, in our “5 Indies From September” list a couple of week ago, and in that article I mentioned that, having only played a bit of the demo at that point, I was unsure how long it could feel unique for. There are, however, at least three things that worked to keep me returning, the most basic of which is the oddly-motivating number written on the wall which increases each time you complete the good ending. Perhaps more mechanically interesting are those 160 Lucky Charms: a huge reason that I would go for certain strategies was to work towards unlocking more of them, which can only be done by reaching certain milestones. At first, players are constantly unlocking new charms by happenstance: you achieve the goals required to get them just through regular gameplay, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you need to actually focus on their targets. This means trying to win the game through methods that are often less efficient than your tried-and-tested strategies.

Even more importantly in terms of the game’s replayability are the Memory Cards: consumables you unlock relatively early on, which are used at the start of each run in order to change up its rules. There are savants out there who’ve somehow already completed the game’s rarest of achievements, Lord of the Pit, which requires you to win the game three times with each of those memory cards, of which there are twenty. That’s – to flex my incredible mathematical skills – sixty wins in total, after which I would suggest the game is about as complete as it can be.

While those memory cards do change up the game so it’s a little different each time, there’s only a handful that feel truly unique, to the point that you significantly alter the way you play the game. If, for example, all your spins come in one extra-long round, as opposed to the typical three rounds of seven spins each, suddenly what makes a good Lucky Charm is thrown askew. The usually-incredible-valuable ‘Cat Food’, for example, which adds two extra spins per round, doesn’t feel very impactful at all: instead of, effectively, six extra spins per deadline, now it’s just giving you two. Items that recharge at the end of rounds are pretty much a one-and-done, because, gimmicks with batteries aside, it’ll take half the run before you can use them again. On the other hand, something that scales as a round progresses now has so much longer to develop: there’s items that can double the value of your symbols until the end of a round, if you can reliably trigger those you’re looking at a proverbial chessboard full of wheat. The balance (and thus the ways you can break the game) is entirely different.

If all twenty of the memory cards were that impactful – which, within the confines of CloverPit, would be pretty difficult for the developers to achieve – then I could see myself joining those aforementioned savants. Unfortunately most of them aren’t, though: they’ll change things a bit, but rarely in a way that makes you actually play differently. Really, none of them massively alter the way you approach the slot machine, save the example I’ve given and the ying to it’s yang, where you have seven rounds but each with only one spin.

Back to that question though. Are you even having fun? Perhaps it was bad timing, because it came at a moment when I wasn’t entirely convinced that I was, during a run that I didn’t want to leave but which also didn’t feel like it was progressing anywhere. I’d already earnt the door key, the strategy I was using wasn’t really going to help with unlocking anything new, but… the numbers were still going up, you know? I’m not saying this is accurate of CloverPit, but there are certainly games in the past where I was rarely enjoying myself but felt compelled to continue.

Two days into the game’s release the developers had already fixed some of the things that made those longer runs drag on a bit too much: namely options to speed up the animations to be more suitable for our 21st century attention spans. It sometimes annoys me when people complain about things taking too long in other games, but I have to admit that here it was blissfully welcome.

*Image: Panik Arcade / Future Friends Games / IndieLoupe.com*

So… am I even having fun? Yeah. Do I think I would be if I tried to 100% the game by completing it forty-five more times? …no, probably not.

I have no idea whether Panik Arcade are planning to build on it or if they’re ready to move onto the next thing (or, indeed, if they intend enjoy early retirement off the back of their half-a-million units sold in eight days), but, in its current state, I think I’m more or less done with CloverPit. And, for upwards of twenty hours of fun for around ten of your local currency (unless you live in a strange country, apologies to our readers in Poland and Brazil), I’d say it’s decent value for money, as is the roguelike way. CloverPit is awarded an 8/10 by IndieLoupe.com.

…maybe there’s time for just one more round.

The reviewed product was provided by the publisher.

Video review: IndieLoupe.com

Review: CloverPit

CloverPit

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