Man some games just hit right. I was doing my usual doomscroll through my wishlists, review queue and Xbox Gamepass releases (something which is becoming a worse value proposition by the day) and what do I come across? A scratcher based incremental game called Scritchy Scratchy. Now, given my recent foraying into this genre, I was intrigued and quickly flicked it off to a friend who was also a fellow make number bigger enjoyer. A few hours later I get a message from him saying I’d nerd sniped him and we shared a laugh about it. Then a couple days later I check back in on him and see he’d racked up 15 hours playtime in the same time I’d accumulated a measly 2. Whilst I never reached those heights what followed was multiple, long sessions that saw me get drawn deeper into this incremental than I ever thought I would.
The premise is easy enough to understand: you can start off with washing dishes to make a few bucks before you’ll be given access to a catalogue of scratchers to try and gamble your way out whatever poverty you seem to find yourself in. The secret advantage you have over everyone else trying these scratchers is that you can, through means that are probably nefarious in nature, increase your luck with them. The usual house advantage will no longer applies and you are now free to scratch as many as you want in order to make your coin. But how fast can you do it and, when the time comes, will you be the good company man that your benefactors want you to be?
Incrementals, roguelikes and deck builders alike have all seemed to settle on the pixel art aesthetic for one reason or another. Maybe it’s the disarming sense of nostalgia, perhaps is the ease at which those assets can be created or possibly it’s because simple graphics such as those mean there’s a whole bunch more headroom for performance when you start stressing your poor computer with floating point calculations that are far beyond anything it’s ever seen before. Whatever the reason Scritchy Scratchy pulls it off well, riffing on the Balatro-esque aesthetics with its own unique take.
Scritchy Scratchy is an incremental and we all know what that means: your primary directive is to make that number go up. It’s a simple game of calculating the payback percentage on any particular ticket and then rinsing the one with the highest payout until you unlock the next one that you can start working on. Your main barriers to progression will come in the form of the upgrades available to you, initially starting with more direct things like luck, coin size and coin strength. The last two matter in the game’s early stages as you will be scratching a lot of tickets early on before you start to unlock other items that will allow you to be more hands off. After each round you’ll accumulate a number of points that you can then spend on permanent upgrades which you’ll need if you want to hit those higher numbers in any reasonable amount of time.
The game does a good job of subtly signalling to you when it’s time to end the current run by slowing progress down to a crawl. It’s at this point you can either pivot to maximising the amount of upgrade points you’ll be taking away, usually by going back and winning jackpots you might’ve missed, or simply restart the run and then hope the upgrades you choose make a material difference. If I’m honest most of them don’t feel particularly game changing on their own however there are a lot of them that open up potential additional strategies for progression that help to cover over some of the more boring sections of a particular run.
It took me a few hours to get the hang of everything as I found myself getting through the first couple stages relatively quickly but then started to stall out with Catalogue #2 due to the rather high cost associated with “bad” tickets. Now there are ways to avoid that and indeed one upgrade erases that problem entirely but there was definitely a couple hours there where I felt like there was a gate on my progress that required a lot more manual work than I was expecting. Once you realise that it’s just a matter of the right upgrades and figuring out the timing of when to switch up to the next scratcher things start to feel a lot more even from a pacing perspective.
Then what’s left after you’ve seemingly beaten the game? Well there’s a number of achievements that push you down the non-traditional route and they are quite fun to accomplish. I’ve stopped myself short of trying to 100% the game though as the gap between where I am and that goal is enough to make me question how much fun I’d actually have doing it. I am most certainly the kind of person who could accidentally ruin their impression of game should I keep playing beyond where I felt satisfied with it.
I had only a couple minor issues when playing it, seemingly arising from alt-tabbing at certain sections. There was a part when I was about to end a run (you’ll know it when you get there) where a button simply didn’t register a click for me. Now I’m not complaining too much about that as it did net me an achievement but there were some other times when the hit detection went out the window for a bit. Thankfully the game’s checkpointing is amazing and essentially zero progress was lost when I had to recover from one of those events.
Scritchy Scratchy is everything I need from an incremental game: a good mix of mechanics, the ongoing dopamine hits of bigger numbers and just enough challenge to make it engaging throughout any one run. I honestly did not expect to get as hooked (or nerd snipe my friend so hard) with it but in all honesty that’s the kind of surprise I don’t mind having sprung on me. If this genre is your jam then you can’t go past Scritchy Scratchy, it’s well worth the time.
Rating: 8.75/10
Scritchy Scratchy is available on PC and Android right now for $9.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 8.7 hours total playtime and 85% of the achievements unlocked.