Poker Night's 1.5.0 Update Is Weirdly Perfect for Switch

Poker Night at the Inventory’s 1.5.0 update has gone live on Nintendo Switch, and its marquee feature is a toggle called Stank Mode — a filter that deliberately drains the color, thickens the smoke, and repaints the table in the dingier palette of the 2010 original. Four new tables come with it: Toys of Power, Parsnips A-Plenty, Gabe’s Shirt XXXL, and Mann vs. Machine, each unlocked by winning tournaments rather than bought. That this landed as version 1.5.0 and not a paid pack tells you something about the game’s shape. Poker Night is a five-minute-commitment title — a hand or two, a cutscene, done — which is exactly the rhythm a handheld rewards. It’s the rare card game that plays better in your hands than at a desk, and this patch quietly leans into that.

Stank Mode Is the Anti-OLED Setting Nobody Asked For

Shipping a setting whose entire job is to make your game look worse is a strange flex — unless you’re a fan of the original. Stank Mode reverts the lighting and color grade to the murkier look of the 2010 release, and on a Switch OLED’s contrast-rich panel, that shift is going to be very obvious. The joke is the point: it’s a nostalgia filter for people who miss the grime, and it’s the kind of feature you flip on once, grin at, and then argue about in a Discord.

The four new tables are the more practical addition. Toys of Power, Parsnips A-Plenty, Gabe’s Shirt XXXL (a Penny Arcade nod) and Mann vs. Machine (Team Fortress 2) are all tournament unlocks, so the update hands you reasons to keep grinding rather than a storefront prompt. For a game whose whole appeal is the banter between the Player’s club regulars, more felt tops means more chances to hear lines you haven’t triggered yet — which is the only progression system that ever mattered here.

The Item-Round Fix Is the Real Quality-of-Life Win

The underrated change is a new setting that lets special item buy-ins repeat even after you’ve won them. It won’t grant duplicate rewards, but it reopens content that used to dead-end once you’d collected everything — meaning completionists finally have a reason to keep sitting down after the collection’s finished rather than waiting for a fresh file.

The fix list matters more on a handheld than it sounds. Restored chip sounds in win cutscenes, working pause-menu slider and toggle audio, a squashed black-screen bug when switching off the Automata or Telltale Shield tables, and even the corrected Tycho-eyebrow and Heavy-visor glitches all target the seams where portable play puts the most stress — you’re constantly pausing, suspending mid-hand, and slipping between short sessions. A cutscene that fades to black on a small screen reads as a crash, not a transition, and lost menu audio after a resume is the kind of thing that quietly sours a commute. If you’d written Poker Night off as a curiosity, 1.5.0 is the build to revisit: it’s the most content the game has ever had on Switch, and its hand-or-two loop fits a handheld better than almost anything else in the studio’s back catalogue.