I have a confession to make: I love lotto scratchers, sometimes called scratch-off tickets, so damn much. I know they rarely pay out. I know they’re designed to sucker you in. I know all of that. And yet, every so often, I’ll spend $10 on a few tickets and scratch them off with a coin. Rarely do I win, but I almost always feel silly and dirty afterwards. Luckily for me, Scritchy Scratchy is a new Steam game that lets me digitally scratch thousands of tickets without feeling like a fool.
Out now on Steam for just $7, Scritchy Scratchy is similar to a plethora of other PC games that have popped up recently that are sort of like idle clicker games, but with a bit more gameplay. In the case of Scritchy Scratchy, that extra bit of gameplay is that you get to scratch off a bunch of lotto tickets, some with different rules and gimmicks. Well, first you have to wash dishes to earn some cash to start buying tickets, but once you’ve done that, there’s no going back to washing dishes. It’s all ticket scratching, all the time.
Eventually, as you scratch off more and more and win larger sums of money, you can buy pricier tickets that payout more while also buying upgrades, like a coin that rips through the tickets faster, and even spend cash to improve your luck. How? Don’t worry about it, you got tickets to scratch off!
As you earn even more money, you can buy a little robot that scratches off tickets for you and a fan that can shove tickets into the bot. But you can’t just rely on the bot, because some tickets hide punishing symbols that, if fully uncovered, will force you to pay a penalty. Carefully scratching these tickets off is all about revealing just enough of these bad symbols to avoid losing money. Feed these to the bot, and he’ll scratch everything off, and oops, that mistake could cost you $200,000 or more. Oh well, you can always go back to washing dishes if needed.
Scritchy Scratchy’s gameplay loop isn’t the most innovative, but it does a very good job of simulating the feeling of actually scratching off a ticket. Flicking my mouse side to side to uncover the symbols on the game’s digital tickets comes pretty dang close to feeling like the real thing. And I don’t have to feel shame afterwards as I clean all the dusty material I’ve scraped off tickets from the car dashboard.
For $7, Scritchy Scratchy is exactly what I want, a lotto scratcher sim, with just enough gameplay and silliness around it to keep it from getting too dull. I’m not sure I’ll be playing this game for dozens of hours, but I wouldn’t want to do that anyway because it would likely destroy my wrist.