Scritchy Scratchy Review

Scritchy Scratchy is the newest darling of the Luckslop genre, where players construct systems through which they experience the highs and lows of gambling—except, through the power of video games, they can control the odds.

Maybe a joker lets them play impossible poker hands. Maybe a removal token lets them get rid of the slots they don’t want to spin up. Games where luck is your greatest weapon, where you win big and reroll quickly. There’s always a gambling theme—poker, pokies(slot machines for the non-Australians), dice rolling—and there’s always a supernatural theme behind the scenes allowing you to cheat the odds.

Usually these games give the player some agency, or at least the illusion of it. You manage your money so you can buy the tools you require to succeed, you choose the strategy you’re going to employ each round to maximise your success.

And on the surface, Scritchy Scratchy is the same.

If you’ve ever played a scratchie, or a scratch-off, scratch card or instant lottery ticket, you’re familiar with the mechanical intricacies of Scritchy Scratchy. You get a card, you scratch it, if you win you get money. So far, so good. Scritchy Scratchy charms things up a bit with the conceit at its base layer—you’re a dishwasher, so when you’re out of money you swipe across dishes instead of across scratchies.

All of this is done by swiping your mouse left and right in rapid succession, like a low-sens Counter-Strike player with choice paralysis. It very quickly becomes uncomfortable, but Scritchy Scratchy gives you options—you don’t need to hold the mouse button down, if you don’t want, and you can also enable an auto-swiper (although it is painfully slow).

The odds of winning on a ticket are displayed for you on the side, and as you earn more money, Scritchy Scratchy allows you to pay to improve those odds. This is the fundamental function of the game. You can also pay to get a hardier coin, which will allow you to scratch tougher tickets, or to make the coin’s scratch size larger, or to get a machine that automatically scratches tickets for you, or a fan to blow tickets across the table to be scratched…it seems like there are a lot of different things for you to buy to change how you play.

But just below the surface is the truth—the only upgrade that matters (until you get the egg timer) is luck. If you improve your luck, you will win more, and until you improve your luck you will win less. Until you realise this, you will often find yourself trapped in a purgatory of earning enough for a big ticket, buying said ticket, busting out (either by winning nothing or, worse, losing big) and then having to wait to earn again. 

And so it seems the only path to victory is to scratch low-price tickets until you’ve earned enough to make a high-priced ticket a viable winning chance. You are playing an idle game, but you’ve never been more active.

You know about idle games, right? Numbers-go-up, the video game genre, what I thought was the purest distillation of the dopamine drip concept in video games, where all pretense is stripped away so that all that is left is a counter that increases and some cookies to be clicked.

I thought it was the purest distillation of that cynical concept, until I played Scritchy Scratchy, where not only do you not technically need to click, but the numbers going up are tied more to odds than finger rapidity or automation strategy.

You’ve played all of Scritchy Scratchy in the first 10 minutes. There is no more to experience. The mechanics don’t change meaningfully from ‘scratch, win, on some tickets lose’. Eventually you can automate the entire process, and once you do the game has finally achieved its goal. You can sit back, slack-jawed and empty-eyed as the numbers go up for you. As the automatic scratching machine and lucky cat turn-in machine allow you to “win” as fast as possible. Now the dopamine drip is turned into pure endorphins, a virtual opioid delivery system that tricks the ‘player’ into thinking they’re enjoying themselves.

Worse to me is the fact that the developers clearly know there’s nothing more to the game than what you see in the first 15 minutes. That’s why you have to die four times before you can reach the actual end game. It’s artificial lengthening, a contemptuous attempt to stall the player lest they feel they haven’t gotten their money’s worth. You die, a forced prestige element, you select some upgrades (if you’re smart you’ll focus on the ones that allow you to automate the game earlier), and then you start over. Soon enough, you’re winning again!

But know for certain that you are “winning” and not achieving victory. You are not achieving anything, you are a passive observer as the game plays for you. This is not a question of difficulty, either. There is no difficulty, because the outcome is predetermined. By opening the game, by waggling your mouse left-and-right, winning is inevitable. That is how the game works. It wants you to win, because winning is what makes you feel good, and that empty feeling of ‘good’ is the core of the game.

This is a hyperbolic time chamber for addictive behaviour, available to anyone of any age for $10AUD. “But you don’t have to pay anything after you buy the game,” defenders might say, but that’s bullshit. Money isn’t the only thing at stake here. You win some, you lose more is about the psychological toll problem gambling imparts on people. Scritchy Scratchy is linking scratching with winning, and by playing it you’re participating in a behaviour adjacent to a real-life gambling addiction. There’s a reason they stopped letting little kids buy candy cigarettes, and it’s not just because of what they were called. They were grooming children to associate good times with smoking.

And now, just because there are bigger predators out there coaxing us into chasing virtual wins for a dopamine rush, we’re ignoring that an entire genre of games has sprung up doing it for a one-time purchase? We’re freefalling into oblivion as a species, and Scritchy Scratchy is trying to get us to hold our arms to our sides. It’s streamlined our neurotransmitter pathways to make us feel good, even while it’s streamlining our path into the ground. And on some level I get it. It’s nice to see the numbers go up in our favour for once. Normally when we see someone adjusting the odds in their favour, they’re the President of the United States committing securities fraud.

But I think it might be time to draw a line in the sand. Games have pushed back hard on the way predatory monetisation techniques have exploited whales the world over, pointing to the ways the lootboxes and gacha systems have exploited people into spending more money than they should or would in typical circumstances. And yet there is an entire subset of games that are built entirely off the back of normalising actual gambling behaviour that are not only ignored, but celebrated.

I worry that this will be seen as pearl clutching, or conspiratorial thinking, but the only meaningful difference between exploiting players’ brain chemistry via predatory monetisation techniques and doing it by manipulating dopamine release via gambling behaviour is the profits seen by the former. Both are actively making the world a worse place.

And the other thing is, Scritchy Scratch is not even fun, as hollow a metric as that is. You are literally just waggling your mouse back and forth. It doesn’t have the clever surprises of other idle games, doesn’t have the knowledge ceiling of Balatro or Spirelikes. Actual Scratchies have more depth than this.

I always endeavour to finish a game when I review it, and I finished Scritchy Scratchy. But I need to make this clear—I wasn’t going to write a review of Scritchy Scratchy. I finished it anyway. I was fully aware of its flaws, too. If you listen to Episode 796 of The GAP you can hear me call it the worst game I’ve ever played and declare that I’ll never play it again. I finished it the next day. It was a cordyceps fungal spore, attached to my brain, compelling me to act while I sat behind the wheel apparently powerless to resist.

The worst game I ever played was Postal 3. I reviewed it for GameArena back in 2012, and I gave it a 1/10. Obviously I am beyond scoring games, now, but I have to imagine Scritchy Scratchy scoring something similar. I find it challenging, expressing how much I hate this game. I hate that it exists, that it is being sold and celebrated and that it enjoys an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam. That it will encourage game developers to follow suit. It feels like it was made by a supervillain, or created for a Black Mirror episode where the twist is the Mega Corporation behind it actually wanted to sell Carpal Tunnel Wrist Braces and addicting children to gambling was simply a happy coincidence.