Every part of the game is oozing with love for the time period, the region, and the sport of gambling. There’s plenty of room for fun story moments that involve cheating that aren’t card games, but these fall by the wayside, especially in the later portions of the game.įrom a presentation standpoint, this game is a stunner. These tricks outside of a card game are an area that the game doesn’t explore enough. On the other hand, you also learn how to do Three Card Monte at the beginning of the game, and, unless I missed it, you do not perform the trick anywhere outside the place you learn it. This is used a few times in the story to great effect. For example, early on you learn how to rig a coin toss. While I overall liked the pacing and constant learning, there are several aspects of the game that are forgotten or not pushed to their full potential. The variety in the gameplay is both Card Sharks’ biggest strength and weakness. But again, this only affected a handful of the almost 30 techniques. So I had to brute force a few tutorials, doing them over and over until I figured out the issue without much help from the game. There is also, as far as I could tell, no way to skip a tutorial for a scam you haven’t done yet. I failed more tutorials than I did actual levels. The tutorials let you try as much as you want, but a few don’t do well enough explaining what you are doing, or not detailing the concept behind the trick thoroughly enough. However, the more complicated tasks can take a while to get used to. The sheer variety of the scams is a ton of fun, and it was smart to make a new one for each level, so that it never gets stale. Some of the techniques require no timing, but memory, like the aforementioned glancing at the card in a shiny tobacco box on the table. You’ll be pressing buttons in time to palm a high card without anyone noticing. You shuffle with the control stick, pressing different directions if you want to shuffle for real, false shuffle, or “injog” a card. The techniques themselves are performed with well timed buttons and stick movements. Every stage has a different gambit, although a handful of them consist of combining techniques from other scams. This can include false shuffling, card bending, looking at dealt cards in a reflection, marking cards, and much, much more. Other times, you have to manipulate the game. Some grifts have you acting outside the card game, like looking at an opponent’s cards while pouring their wine and signaling the Comte with different directions as you wipe the table. These are varied and numerous, and seeing what crazy new way there is to cheat is one of the most exciting parts of the game. Victory or defeat simply comes down to your ability to follow instructions exactly and think on your feet quickly.īefore each level, the Comte explains the latest mark and the scam he plans to run on them in the carriage. In fact, it’s never revealed exactly which game is being played. At no point in this game about cards do you actually play a card game. The game sees each location you travel to acting as its own “minigame”. Eventually, motivations are uncovered and secrets are revealed, but I do not wish to spoil anything. After things go sideways, you team up with the Comte to lie, cheat, and charm your way through France’s upper crust. He thinks a waiter without a tongue would be a perfect unsuspecting accomplice in cheating at cards. After filling the wine glass of a particularly eccentric, wig-wearing man by the name of Comte de St-Germain (who was a real world man who claimed to be an alchemist and was rumored to be immortal), he asks for your help. You play as a nameless, mute young man who lives and works in an inn with a crotchety innkeeper. The game is finally out, and now that I’ve played it front to back, was my excitement justified?Ĭard Shark takes place in 18th century France, just before the French Revolution. It was so clever that I was smitten with its concept: a game about cheating at cards in pre-revolution France. It’s with this mindset that, upon seeing Card Shark, created by the developer of the Reigns series, Nerial, and published by Devolver Digital, the game instantly became my most wanted of the year. But I’m a person who appreciates games that do something completely new – something that’s never been done before. Games have become so expensive to produce that the big companies tend to stick to the tried and true to avoid risks. I’ve admittedly not been blown away by any video game offerings from the major AAA studios for a while now.
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