Lavatro Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
Balatro if the deck was laundry: fill a 4×4 washing machine, stack colour multipliers until green-and-blue broke the sco
I sold almost everything I owned down to two colours, filled the washing machine with green and blue, triggered the colour multiplier, and completely broke the scoring system. Target hit. Run finished. Three hours gone without me noticing. Lavatro is a balatro-like Roguelike about doing laundry from Stuck Pixel Studio. You score points by filling a 4 by 4 washing-machine grid with clothes, then running it, with a limited number of loads before the run ends. My verdict is Play, but probably only if you are already a balatro fan.
Lavatro is a play if you already like balatro-likes and want to see what happens when the board is a washing machine. Chase sticker synergies, respect your load limit early, and expect the colour multiplier to break your sense of difficulty. Try the demo for the joke and the grid puzzle. Wishlist it if Stuck Pixel Studio tightens exploits, adds click-to-fill, and gives the comedy more mechanical teeth before release.
Pros
- Laundry theme is funny enough to hook attention immediately
- 4×4 grid packing gives real early-run puzzle tension
- Sticker synergies escalate from flat points to satisfying multipliers
- Three-hour session proves the loop can sink its teeth in
- Selling clothes and between-round buys add balatro-style planning
Cons
- Colour multiplier stack can trivialise scoring once you commit to two colours
- Dye-card screen switching feels like an unintended exploit
- Folding everything to 1×1 removes the Tetris puzzle late run
- No click-to-fill for single squares means tedious dragging at the end
- Click-and-hold card accept slows pace across long sessions
The washing machine as a scoring puzzle
Clothes come in different sizes: 1 by 1, 1 by 2, 2 by 2, and bigger. Every wash has to count. Between rounds you pick up stickers that give bonuses, buy more clothes, and find things that fold garments down to smaller sizes so they fit. It sounds absurd, and that is the point.
The washing-machine theme on a dark background was enough to grab my attention. The hook lands. This is a different way into the genre than peg boards or card decks, even if the comedy is doing most of the early lifting.
Early runs are just flat points, which is fine but thin. Then the sticker system opens up. Socks next to each other in the wash for a bonus. Gloves next to gloves for another bonus. Then the colour multiplier lands: everything the same colour in the wash gives a multiplier on every single item.
When the colour stack breaks the run
That is when I sold everything that was not green or blue, started dyeing the rest with a card I had picked up between rounds, and stopped worrying about the score entirely because it was going to be fine.
There is even a little exploit on the dye card. Switch screens between the reward screen and the laundry basket before confirming, and the colour often changes. I kept doing it until I got green or blue. I am not sure the dev intended that, but I am not ashamed. I needed to win the run.
The Strategy depth underneath the joke thins out once you find that line. It is not the best balatro-like I have played recently. I preferred a peg-based one from the same stretch of demos. Lavatro still ate three hours I had not planned to spend.
Folding, friction, and who it is for
The folding mechanic that shrinks clothing to 1 by 1 removes the Tetris element the game is built around. By the end of my run everything was a small square, and I was dragging them into the grid one by one with no puzzle left to solve. Eight 1 by 1 items in the drum is a lot of individual mouse drags for no good reason. A click-to-fill option for 1 by 1 items would fix that.
Click-and-hold to accept cards rather than a single click is designed to stop misclicks, but it slows everything down noticeably. Minor friction adds up across three hours of play.
The core Roguelike loop does not have the same depth underneath the comedy once the colour route is solved. The theme is funny enough to grab attention, and the Casual hook of doing laundry on screen is genuinely amusing to watch. For balatro fans looking for a novelty skin on the formula, it is worth a demo session. For everyone else, maybe wait until balance and quality-of-life catches up. There were no Steam reviews yet at the time I played, with no full release date confirmed either.
Game Info
- Developer
- Stuck Pixel Studio
- Publisher
- Stuck Pixel Studio
- Full release
- TBC
- Platform
- PC
- Multiplayer
- No
- Controller
- No
- Playtime
- 3h
Watch the video review: YouTube
Tags: Roguelike, Casual, Strategy, Indie, Management, Deck Builder
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