CloverPit explained: Gambling for your life in Hell

The latest indie horror game making waves is CloverPit, where you must (literally) gamble for your life on a singular rusty, blood-splattered slot machine. In a situation where every round could be your last, the stakes are high as you attempt to use your winnings to pay for your freedom.

If you’re just starting your journey and want a better understanding of the CloverPit gameplay loop, we’ve broken down the strategies, the best items, and how to achieve an ending.

CloverPit explained

CloverPit is a chaotic rogue-lite with the main mechanic being a slot machine. The game sees you locked in a cell with just a slot machine, an ATM, a phone, and a store of lucky charms that grant you boosts while you spin. You are forced to pay off your debts by winning on a slot machine and hitting monetary milestones to pay your mysterious captor. If you can’t raise enough coins, you will fall to your death, and that’s where the “pit” part of the game name comes in.

The CloverPit game loop is designed to feel like you have to win impossible amounts of coins to meet each deadline, especially when all you have to rely on is a slot machine that factors in luck. In an attempt to turn the odds in your favor, you can purchase lucky charms with tickets that you acquire at the end of each round. Power-ups can be added to your arsenal when the phone rings, allowing you to select one of three options.

If you want to rack up the best score possible, CloverPit developer Panik Arcade added an endless mode to allow you to push the machine to its limit. Despite being focused around a slot machine, CloverPit is a rogue-like game and does not use real money, therefore, it’s not considered gambling.

Strategies for winning at CloverPit

Despite the luck involved in CloverPit gameplay, having a reliable strategy from the start of a run can lay the foundation for success.

It’s recommended to choose a symbol early on, so you can create a build around it. Concentrating on a single symbol allows you to shape the reels in your favor, especially since you can gain lucky charms and power-ups that are centered around particular symbols, while also having access to ones that reduce the number of times unwanted symbols pop up on the machine. With that said, don’t be afraid to reroll in CloverPit. Re-rolling lucky charms costs coins, and re-rolling power-ups is done through the use of tickets.

When choosing your power-ups, permanent boosts are best, granting consistent bonuses over numerous rounds, while making sure your chances of hitting that all-important jackpot aren’t at risk. Temporary upgrades may appear powerful on the surface, but they aren’t always reliable when you’re trying to stay ahead of your mounting debt.

The earlier you can buy lucky charms, the better, for more breathing room in early rounds, while helping you take on more difficult rounds. It’s recommended that you get one token after every round of CloverPit. Even if you don’t particularly want it, you can place it in a drawer to become a corpse on the next run, helping you escape. For bigger earnings, you should choose lucky charms that act as a multiplier or increase the base value of your symbols.

To keep your run alive and work towards a CloverPit ending, make sure you are depositing all your leftover coins after shopping for lucky charms, but make sure you leave enough to buy spins in the next round. Keeping on top of your debts is valuable, but depositing money also increases the amount you receive from interest, a tool that can prove to be a game-changer in the latter segments of a run.

CloverPit items & synergies in detail

As indicated by the CloverPit Steam page, there are over 150 items and synergies to improve your RNG.

You’ll want the best CloverPit lucky charms on your side that provide solid boosts and go hand-in-hand with other abilities. The best charms for any build are:

Does CloverPit have an ending?

Many games like CloverPit have multiple endings, and in this case, there’s a true ending and a bad ending.

To get the CloverPit bad ending, you must first unlock each of the four drawers that are below the lucky charms store. To do so, you need to earn the gold keys that appear next to the ATM by hitting deadlines that only increase each time a drawer is unlocked. It’s only possible to earn one key with each run, so it will take some time before you can access all four drawers.

When all drawers are unlocked in your CloverPit game, you need to use them to turn charms into corpse pieces. Purchase any four charms from the lucky charm store and put one in each of the four drawers.

Then, either play out the run until you fail or restart it. At the start of your new run, all the charms will be turned into corpse items. Open each drawer, equip all four corpse items, and purchase the skull from the lucky charm store, priced at four tickets. If the skull doesn’t appear straight away, you’ll have to survive enough rounds to reach store refreshes or re-roll. Once you have the skull, a skull key will appear beside the ATM, and you must accumulate at least 250,000 points to unlock it. You can then use the key to exit through the door.

To achieve the CloverPit true ending, you must complete the eighth deadline with the four corpse items and the skull in your possession. This time around, you need to ignore the phone calls that offer options with red text. A mark will appear on the 666 floppy disk on the slot machine every time a deadline is completed after ignoring a phone call with red text. The most difficult part is that you must trigger 666 once to be able to get the three red phone calls you need before deadline eight. The best way to make 666 appear is by selecting the Heartbreak memory card, ensuring the final round of every deadline after round three triggers at least one 666. The Recovery Attempt memory card is also useful for doubling the appearance rate of 666.

Answering the phone at the beginning of deadline eight will turn it white, and you’ll have to hit a final quota to unlock the white skull key that will spawn next to the ATM. When the key is in your hands, you can open the door, and you will get the true ending of the CloverPit game.