Last year, one game took the gaming market by storm, and it wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3 (whatever that is), but a small card deck themed roguelike called Balatro. Hundreds of thousands of hours across multiple platforms later, Balatro became a huge phenomenon that started to send a lot of questions through the gaming market, questions about the quality of a game to time spent ratio, the cost of a game to how fun it is, and perhaps lastly, what if a game was better than Balatro? It took until 2025 to get that answer, but the answer is a resounding and clear bell. Nubby’s Number Factory is like if Balatro was good: It costs 5 dollars, it looks like it fell off a Windows XP computer disc, it farts at me when I close it, and it is one of my two contenders for 2025’s Game of the Year.
Bouncing Right Along
Nubby’s Number Factory is a roguelike, in that every run is randomized and losing sets you back at 0 to try your luck again. It is also like Peggle, Pachinko, or Plinko, whatever helps you visualize that the major way you, the player, interacts with your board: you hurl Nubby, the titular character, towards pegs, which pop every time Nubby hits them for points related to the numbers printed on them at the time of Nubby hitting them. Of course, everything becomes more complicated from there: each stage’s total points needed to clear it grow exponentially, and to help mitigate that, you can buy items from a shop every few levels, as well as earn Perks that help trigger those items multiple times outside of their basic triggering mechanisms, such as “First Peg Popped” or “Nubby Dies.”
Each run of the basic game asks players to navigate through 80 boards of continually escalating numerical goals, occasionally throwing in various pegs with abilities that affect the board state, like pegs that can cause you to lose points when you pop them, or that shut off your items when fully popped; some are even beneficial, causing explosions that pop pegs for you when hit. The variability of the boards as the difficulty climbs helps keeps runs fresh, as does the randomized shop and perks that can offer different ways of clearing the boards and creating successful runs.
After clearing the basic mode once, players can also unlock Challenge Modes, as well as various other Supervisors that can be unlocked to change up the game, like making items cheaper or making your items more likely to break when used. If this sounds similar to other roguelikes, well, I did say it was a roguelike! But much of this variability and scaling challenge is the heart and soul of great roguelikes such as Slay the Spire and Balatro, and Nubby has much the same in it’s internal logic; finding an infinite combo and clearing a run can feel satisfying, but also leaves you itching for more, itching to figure out what you could do differently if you were able to try again… and then pulling you back in.
Tim & Eric-core
The real star power of Nubby’s Number Factory, though, lies in the aesthetic touches of the game. Nubby looks like a game made on a computer from 1996, and I mean that with the most positive praise it is possible to give something. Nubby’s Number Factory looks like a game you would see on an episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job! as some sort of background Cinco product that didn’t actually exist, and yet here it is, in your computer. Perhaps it is a bit of wistful nostalgia or a heightened ability to appreciate intentionally-crafted things against the modern wave of AI slop and generic AAA trappings, but Nubby’s specific brand of visual and audio aesthetic speaks to me in a way that very few things do these days, feeling authentic and almost specifically ugly on purpose; there are snot effects and fart noises and items named “Poopbutt,” and all of it works in a way that is engagingly silly and also incredibly endearing. It is a riot to talk to people playing Nubby or watching people play Nubby say things like, “I really need to proc my Cheese House early so that I can sell it late game and swap to Jacks and Cactus, but I’m having a hard time passing up Poopbutt right now” and go from thinking they are making all of this up to completely understanding that sentence perfectly. And that doesn’t even get into the food items.
After about 100+ hours, though, I will admit that I’ve started to slowly turn down the music and play my own playlist in the background, but I think that’s fine. The music is great and the update made the music evolve as you moved from area to area in you run, but it is also the same music over and over again, and the music is at least far more varied than Balatro’s warbling track. The little weird hand-drawn art on things is even more human, making Nubby feel very “indie” in a way that “indie” has started to include multi-million dollar companies with hundreds of employees. If anything, Nubby is alt art, am alt game that wants to make fun of gaming conventions as much as it loves them dearly, making a statement creatively through evocative imagery and experience. Because while the sentence above about items sounds like nonsense–because it is, at least on the surface–it belies the deep engine that is underneath Nubby that prevents it from being just a joke that overstays its welcome.
Really, calling the game “Tim and Eric-core” is high praise; repeated viewings of the T&EASGJ catalog reveal a team that deeply love the weird analog world of television and video production, and Nubby’s Number Factory has that similar love and reverence for late 90s-00s digital media and programming.
Okay, But the Balatro Thing Is a Joke, Right?
No, actually, I truly believe Nubby is better than Balatro. Of course this is all subjective, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I’ll show my work: Balatro’s problem is that once you complete a set of stakes on any deck, the process of starting that over and doing it again begins to become less and less appealing, meaning that playing the game over and over starts to wear out it’s welcome with exponential speed, especially if your first set of full clears is already a huge hurdle. But my biggest actual problem with Balatro is that after the 100 to 200~ hour mark in the game, a relatively familiar player will realize their run is over before the first Boss blind, which is extremely unfun after a while. Playing a small blind or just seeing what hand you get on the Boss Blind after skipping to it and going “oh, run’s over” and restarting dominates a large portion of “late game” Balatro play, and I found extremely boring after a while. This also meant that my short bursts of playing Balatro were less and less rewarding, and I found myself less and less interested in spending small pockets of free time with the game to just go, “Oh, guess I lost. Oh, guess I lost. Oh, maybe–nope,” for a while.
Of course, I can probably hear some of your voices: ”You got bored after 200 hours of playing a game and you’re complaining?” The answer is… that’s complicated. In the era of games that try to sell you a top of the line blockbuster event that comes in around 60-80 hours, or indie titles that want or crave your attention for uninterrupted six hour blocks of time, I increasingly find that I find less and less joy with games that want me to pay attention to them for literal weeks of my life to “beat”. But games that I can play for an hour, over hundreds of individual hours, have become more and more of a joy. A distraction in the middle of the day, something to enjoy while having coffee or taking a break between work, yet deeply rewarding in those hours I spend with the games, are the experiences I’ve been craving in between playing larger games that are far few and between for me now.
Now, obviously, Nubby’s Number Factory is not as portable as Balatro, which is certainly one detriment to it’s name, but it is also Five US Dollars, rather than 40, and certainly not 60, or 80. I have currently played Nubby’s Number Factory for nearly 165 hours, which means that I’ve entertained myself for something akin to .03 cents an hour. That’s a pretty good investment for enjoyment, and since I’ve managed to get my partner and friends to play the game and talk to them about it, it’s allowed me to have even more fun watching them play it and discuss the game with them. It’s an organic and exciting social experience that is hard to put a valuation on except to say that it is a priceless time that I cherish deeply.
Of course, you may try Nubby and say, “Marcy, this game is not better than Balatro, it’s stupid,” but I will simply remind you that it only cost you five dollars for a momentary diversion on the road to the grave, which I think is still probably worth your investment.
Hope You Got Five Bucks
My usual goal with a review is to hope that my writing will convince at least one person to try something out on my recommendation. This is often a far more difficult goal than it seems, because it is often hard to gauge what impact a written suggestion may have; but, the end goal doesn’t change whether I’m reviewing something that cost me a lot of money or a little amount of money, nor does it change whether the game is enshrined as my top 5 of the year or just something I tried playing and forgot about in a month.
Nubby is a temporary thing; I’m sure by 2026 I will probably have gotten all of the experience I could have ever wanted out of it, and moved on to other titles. Currently, I’m playing a heavier game that is taking up most of my single-player game time, and my Nubby time has decreased, but that doesn’t stop me from highly recommending it. If anything it makes me recommend it more, because I still have the urge to play it, and often do find myself playing it for a little bit at a time. I still want to complete all of the challenges at least once, I still have a few supervisors to complete a run with, and I know that no matter how hectic my life gets or how much the world is on fire, if I have a little time on my hands, I can play Nubby and get exactly what I’m looking for: satisfaction.
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