‘Luck Be a Landlord’ – There Really is a Roguelike for Everything Including Slot Machines and Rent

I’m usually fairly up to date on the various comings and goings of the roguelike genre. I can tell you that, for whatever reason, there is a surge of co-op driven roguelikes between Windblown, Camelot, Hyper Light Breaker, and 33 Immortals. I can tell you that in the wake of the uber successful poker roguelike Balatro we have seen a whole bunch of “what do you mean there’s a roguelike of that” between Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers (a Blackjack roguelike), Passant (A Chess roguelike), and Peglin (a Pachinko roguelike). What I could not have told is that predating all of these is Luck Be a Landlord, a slot machine roguelike that came out on PC in 2023. 

As a connoisseur of the genre, when offered a chance to review the console port, well I couldn’t pass up the chance. I got my copy on the Switch and immediately spun my symbols to earn coins in order to pay my landlord with increasingly strict rent prices. And then, as is always the case, during initial playthroughs, I proceeded to be unable to meet the threshold and thus was thrown to the start of the loop with a clean-ish slate and slightly more knowledge and a better appreciation of the in-game hints. Luck Be a Landlord is almost an auto-battler. For the most part, all of your agency is vested in which symbols are available to spin on the virtual slot machine and which items (relic analogs) you pick up. You do get a steady access to rerolls and removals, and at that th…