The Devil’s Due takes Balatro’s poker to Hell, where cheating is the only way to win

Ever since Balatro turned the poker hand into one of the most addictive engines in modern games, the card roguelite has become a crowded table. Most newcomers borrow the arithmetic and stop there. The Devil’s Due, from the Norwegian studio Games People Play, starts from a premise any card sharp would recognize: the problem is not the deck, it is the rules. You have already lost your soul to the Devil over a game of poker, and the only way back up is to cheat.

Each duel pits you against a single demon, and every hand does double duty: the strength of the poker combination sets your damage, while the sum of the card values becomes your defence. On top of that sits the real game, an expanding arsenal of dirty tricks. You can hide a card and slip it back in mid-battle, inflate values or sabotage the hand across the table. Every trick, though, feeds your opponent’s suspicion meter, and push it too far and the demon lashes back with a punishing counterattack.

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That meter is the cleverest idea here, because it turns cheating from a power fantasy into a performance: you are not only optimizing a hand, you are managing how guilty you look. The bosses bend the rule further. In one of the studio’s screenshots, a monocled demon of Pride sipping tea under a top hat heals from every point of suspicion, which quietly flips the risk calculation. The roster is built on the seven deadly sins, and between duels come shops you can scam, suspiciously “fair” minigames and healing shrines.

At the start of each layer of Hell, the Devil lays out tarot cards that chart your route through fights, bosses, shops and shrines, although, as the announcement puts it with a wink, you were never one to let others decide your path. Death sends you back to the beginning, but permanent upgrades, new cheat cards and relics carry over.

The look is the other calling card. The animation borrows the cut-out absurdity of Monty Python; EDGE magazine, quoted in the announcement, praised a visual style inspired by Terry Gilliam’s animations for the troupe. The screenshots bear it out: demons like Victorian engravings come to life, a grinning clown boss crackling with lightning, a Devil in a wide-brimmed hat fanning cards across a candlelit table.

Games People Play is the work of two longtime friends, Jack Kristoffersen and Joachim Barrum, who have made games together for more than 30 years; their previous release was SpreadCheat. The Devil’s Due spent roughly a year as a public demo on Steam before its full release.

The game launched on Steam for Windows PC on November 10, published by Games People Play and Vsoo Games. It costs $14, with a 20% launch discount during its first two weeks; regional pricing may vary, and owners of Degenerate Gamblers, Decktamer, Card Shark or Rune Dice can save more through bundles. It is available in 13 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and no real money is involved.

In a genre that has spent years teaching players to count cards, The Devil’s Due asks them to palm one instead.

Tags: roguelite games, Balatro, card games, Games People Play, Monty Python, The Devil's Due

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