Passant: A Chess Roguelike

Turning chess into a roguelite is a tough premise, because the skill difference in chess players is huge. If your game is 95% chess then grandmaster level players will breeze through your game without having to interact with your roguelike mechanics at all, and at that point they might aswell play chess. If the roguelike mechanics are so powerful that chess noobs can rely on them for support, and playing correct moves is no longer important, then your game becomes just about the metagame and the chess is trivialized. At the end of the day Passant suffers from the same issue, but until you've figured out all the mechanics it's actually a great game. You have to play decent chess in the early game, where material is equal, and you have to interact with roguelike mechanics because your opponents will have 70 points of material in the later game. Once you've figured out which items are good then it's just chess again though, so for me it's back to chess.com. All in all 7€ well spent though -- Passant is probably my favourite chess roguelite, on par with Usurper.

This game is very fun and has some very broken combos

Stupidly hard even on the easiest settings. there's so many times where I've had to concede a match because the AI will just keep jumping back and forth and neither of us can take a piece. I'm not genius at chess or anything, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ even the easiest difficulties are bs.

It is chess Balatro, but with actual chess. Unlike Balatro which tosses out most of the game it is based on, in Passant you still play chess. It borrows mostly the random Roguelite upgrades and stage system from Balatro. There are more win conditions than normal, such as winning by consecutive checks or taking all non king pieces, etc., and of course fairy pieces/mechanics. You also have the ability to set up your starting positions, so you can live your fantasy of having queens/rooks on the second row. It can be fun to set up a one/two move checkmate, though these only happen in the early stages usually.

Closest to Balatro among what I have seen so far

Not a fan. I guess it's a good example of the fact that you can't just ape Balatro but use another game instead of Poker and be fine. First off, it's ugly. I don't have a word to describe it, but UI looks very basic, and the pieces, oh god, instead of going for any established sort of figure presentations, the dev went for 3d models, and i'm sorry, when i can't tell a pawn from a bishop at a glance you may have a problem.