Gambling is one of those things where I can’t tell if there actually is skill beyond a handful of games or if it’s just luck and wealth manifest. Oh sure, there are people who used to walk away from the casinos with hundreds of thousands in their pockets, but how much did they put in initially, and what percentage of that came from card games versus something like roulette? Gambling seems like fun in theory, but it’s a terrible affliction for people who see it as the only way out. Naturally, Panik Arcade decided to answer the question “What if gambling was your only way out?” The result is Clover Pit, a roguelike slot machine that seems to be in the zeitgeist. For anyone who really wanted to throw away their lives at a slot machine but can’t be bothered to actually go to Atlantic City, this is for you.

Behold, your view for about 95% of the entire game.

Awaken. You’re in a dank, filthy room with many things and yet so little. There is a door. There is a telephone. There is a curious shelf of knicknacks, an ATM, and, most importantly, a slot machine. The rules are simple: deposit the target amount of money into the ATM before the deadline runs out. Failure to do so will draw your attention to the most important feature of the room: the trap door directly beneath you. So you play, because what else can you do? But, even as you make money, you see and feel that something is deeply, deeply wrong. The voice on the other end of the phone seems to be only pretending to help. The charms you find glow in a sinister aura. Most upsetting of all is that when you die (and you will die), you wake right back where you started. This is Hell.

Clover Pit is an odd duck when it comes to getting invested in the game. Even moreso than other roguelikes, you understand the core gameplay instantly. This slot machine is even simpler than most out there today, because you only control the start of the spin, nothing else. Getting three or more in a line gives you coins, and depositing the coins to make your coal keeps you alive. You also get awarded tickets that can be used to purchase lucky charms that affect the game one way or another. Some charms may give you extra spins, some might make certain symbols more worthwhile, and some affect your overall savings. There are literally hundreds that can be unlocked through gameplay achievements, and I’ll spare you by trying to list them all.

Getting this charm guarantees that you’ll never see another 5+ pattern afterwards.

The further along you get in Clover Pit, the more you start to understand and delegate importance to one thing or another. For example, the phone rings every time you meet a deadline, and the mysterious entity on the other end can give you some kind of boon that’ll affect your game in the long or short term. You’ll begin to see the importance of how and when to rotate out charms, which becomes more viable when you unlock drawers to safely put away the charms so that you can purchase and rotate in others. The whole thing builds well in terms of giving you a false sense of control as you get deeper and deeper into the game, dying and resurrecting to keep pursuing the one armed bandit. I won’t deny that it has an addictive quality to it, both in atmosphere and appeal.

After all, Clover Pit feels like it dropped at the right time of the year. Exceptionally gritty and dark, it feels like elements of Buckshot Roulette and Inscryption influenced the design and the atmosphere, riding the line of macabre and morbid with real gallows humor. The distorted voice that announces “let’s go gambling” has the right creepiness to it, and the almost playful Devil that pops up when your round is over reminds you of the foreboding limit to your gameplay. The stark brightness to the slot machine against the grimy room you’re trapped in puts everything into sharp perspective, and I imagine it’s even more jarring if you play in VR.

The guy on the phone talks like he’s both trying to sell and buy drugs from me at the same time.

And yes, there’s a distinctly Satanic theme running throughout, so you may need to avoid this game if such imagery bothers you. There’s charms that specifically reference Christian ideas, like a Bible that can protect you from a 666 on the slot machine (a 666 will destroy all your winnings up to that point), but also a whole theological courseload of additional trinkets. Ankhs, tarot cards, the Necronomicon…the gang’s all here, and everything points to the fact that you are clearly somewhere punishing and evil, and you may deserve to be there. It takes a while for reveals to come through in Clover Pit, but the existence of body parts that can be put on your slot machine as “decorations” should tell you that something messed up is going on here.

However, once you get over the initial shock of the situation and the grisly premise, Clover Pit quickly shifts from a game into a patience tester, and it devolves into a chore in no time flat. I’ve been to casinos before, and one thing I’ve learned is that slot machines are simply the worst choice for what to do with your time and money. Statistically, they have the lowest payout rates of anything in the casino, and also make hand over fist because of how easy they are to play. In a country full of sedentary desperation, the “shiny box that might fix all my problems” remains a staple wherever gambling is legal and people want to win without doing anything. Don’t kid yourself about slot skill: you’re lucky, and that luck can last exactly six seconds.

Getting this solved none of my problems and only reminded me how screwed I really was.

Clover Pit does its best to implement a lot of gameplay modifiers to impress some kind of variable control into the world, but it only goes so far and does so much. With Balatro, you can shape the deck towards your gameplay style, adding and removing jokers, thinning and changing cards to match the direction you’re going, and, yes, hope for a bit of luck to guide your hand. Most roguelike games allow the players’ own skill to dictate the ultimate success or failure, and the powerups or skill adaptations are influences that let them go further. By comparison, if you get the best charms possible on the first try, you can still bottom out in Clover Pit before hitting the first deadline because that’s how slot machines go. You can go hot as anything for several spins, bank enough to fly past two deadlines, and still die unfairly.

While this sounds like a complaint about a game being hard, it’s more about an imbalance in the core mechanics of it all. If you have a good setup within the game but are still early on, you simply can’t win. There are several unlocks that you have to hit, and you’re not allowed to unlock more than one at a time. The result is having a fantastic seed build that you can’t utilize to its fullest extent. Even then, the scope of the game is so limited that there really isn’t much else that can be done. I know, it’s a slot machine roguelike, how dare I want to do something besides spin the slots. But there’s just no…flair to it. Getting a jackpot, awesome, cool, but the success/thrill of it is so surface level that it doesn’t resonate in my gamer soul.

At least you can sit on the toilet and contemplate just what a terrible position you’re in.

The worst part is realizing how fast time sinks into Clover Pit while not necessarily showing anything for it. Even though I am utterly horrid at Hades, Dead Cells and Nuclear Throne, I can at least show something for my time by knowing a new way to get through a certain boss, or unlocking another passive modifier. But here, everything is to chance, and it blows. You can turn charms into mods for the next run, but the mods are always the same, so the thrill doesn’t exist. If you get bad spins, that’s it: the luckiest additions in the world won’t save you from just bottoming out in the spin game. I like to look and think “hey, look how far I’ve come!” and not “wow, I could have watched a couple of movies instead.”

Clover Pit can hook you and keep you there, but so can a bear trap, and I wouldn’t recommend stepping in one to spend an afternoon. There might be some balancing in the future that’ll make it more worthwhile, but, for now, it becomes a Skinner Box of pain that fills you with hope and dashes it just as quickly. It’s not a bad title for a spooky season, and streaming it gives a shared sense of thrill, but a solo endeavor only carries you as far as you are willing to roll the bones. And I? I personally would like to step away and go get murdered in a game that gives me a fighting chance instead.

Clover Pit is available now on Steam.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Clover Pit was provided by the publisher.