Due to the popularity of Balatro, many competitors have risen in the indie sphere. Aotenjo is a Mahjong variant of the popular Balatro title, and its aiming to compete. The indie scene is always full with surprises, because titles, while sometimes taking from others, manage to bring their own spin. However, it seems that the difficulty curve of Aotenjo was unfortunately pretty unbalanced. This has been fixed with the new update that dropped a while ago. We at Infinite Start will cover the changes it brought.
Full Flush
Many changes have been added to the game, mainly affecting bosses and score progression. Beyond reducing randomness, they have been closely monitoring feedback on difficulty levels, especially regarding the some difficulty tiers. The gap between the base difficulty and Goose was too significant, making Goose feel like an impossible spike to climb. To properly fix this, the people of XOCat have reduced the score requirement increase for Goose difficulty by 30% to create a smoother progression.
Along with that, other changes include things such as corruption mechanics, they previously mentioned their goal of preserving corruption-based builds rather than outright removing them. The issue with the old corruption mechanic was that it altered tiles mid-game, affecting discard choices. The updated version now cleanses the corruption effect when a corrupted tile is discarded, and has great synergy with the increased discard limit and providing an effective countermeasure in the late-game Endless Mode, where discards are abundant.
Aotenjo is still a title in early access, many of them tend to be rough around the edges. But with these updates, it seems that there will soon be another proper competitor to Balatro. Perhaps people will start seeing a rise in multiple Balatro-like titles in the future with different games as a base, such as Aotenjo, further popularizing the genre. We live interesting times when it comes to the indie scene.
