It all starts so well for Card Shark, like a hand you think you’re winning. An interesting concept, a unique protagonist, a conspiratorial story and a nice, tactile UI with satisfying clicks and clacks. It’s a fantastic starting point – one that at some point gets lost among dull minigames, frustrating memorisation, repetitive gameplay, and a plodding story. It’s a shame, but there’s a glimmer of light in there for those who find the aesthetic trumps everything else.
On that, you will know immediately from a trailer whether the music and art style of Card Shark is going to hold up for you. The music certainly works for the late-renaissance French setting, and the art is integrated and specific enough that it feels like a stylistic choice rather than a budgetary one. It may not fit your tastes, but it certainly does fit the game, and that should always be praised – even if more subtle animation would be useful for the gameplay conceits.
You play a nameless man, unable to speak and suffering from unnamed ‘attacks’ of the nerves. Be it anxiety from the nightmares of the age or something deeper-rooted, our silent but expressive protagonist is recruited into the service of Comte de Saint-Germain – a real-life and well-known philosopher-adventurer of the age. You help him cheat at cards, though the game is never specified, to gather money and investigate a royal conspiracy known as the 12 Bottles of Milk.
The Comte and our young friend are joined by an eclectic cast of heroic thieves and thinkers alongside various cruel, stupid, cunning, or plain capitalist upper-class villains. There’s some genuinely funny writing in there, especially regarding stereotypes of the age surrounding the English and French. Small actions, choices in writing, and the way you’re addressed by different members of the cast expose some good subtleties, and help with world-building for a reality-adjacent 18th century France.
Unfortunately, Card Shark is unable to make it all hold together. The core conceit – you use sleight of hand, positioning, and smarts to outwit and cheat opponents in card games – simply doesn’t hold up. The game or games being played are never defined. Your actions aren’t put into context of why feeding good cards constantly to your allies or informing the Comte of your opponent’s holdings helps. Bets are made, but on what, why, or what convinces foes to keep playing despite losing isn’t made clear. Cheating is a vastly more complex task than ‘I get the good cards, you get the bad ones’ and none of that is echoed or approached in-game.
This is redoubled by how simply unbelievable most of the cheats are. Clearly some imagination and research has gone into all the different ways to sneak a peek at an opponent’s hand or shuffle the best cards where you want them in a deck. However, too often it relies on naivety or stupidity on the part of your opponents – oh yes, it’s fine for your manservant to play with us Comte, pour us drinks from over our shoulder, repeatedly wipe the table, and then leave the room for minutes at a time. I don’t expect highly expert card players with the knowledge a modern internet connection brings to the table, I do expect them to not be completely stupid and the games they’re playing to have rules of any sort.
A suspicion meter is the way the game paints your opponents as starting to get the gist of what’s going on, but it’s mostly raised by increasing the bet size, rather than what you’re actually doing. Indeed, messing up a cheat is more likely to simply lose you the hand (lowering their suspicion of you, but never by enough that it feels worth doing deliberately) rather than lead to you being found out.
That leads to the actual gameplay of executing the tricks and traps of cheating your opponents out of their money. Some are good, such as the semi-complex quick-time events of three-card monte or the process of not pouring wine too quickly or slowly while glancing at someone’s hand. Others are nonsensical, like believing an opponent will always cut at the point you scuff a card in the deck, while still others are simply too complicated and involve too similar movements to be fun to execute.
Forgot if slipping a card in place was up or left on the d-pad? That’s this whole round ruined, hope you didn’t bet too much. Need to identify the highest card you deal to an opponent with a reflective surface? You’ll also be dealing all the other cards to the table, incredibly slowly. That lack of pace can be just as frustrating – it takes forever to do even the simplest things with the deliberately-cumbersome controls, and they’re designed for analogue sticks but still often require digital movements. It’s simply annoying.
This could all be remedied if failing was a part of the story, or an enjoyable process. It isn’t. Being caught cheating is more entertaining than losing all your money, but is far rarer and involves a quick trip to the afterlife to bet your soul against death. If all your money is gone, you need to take money from the poorest folks in repetitive games until you’ve got enough to get back to whatever you were doing. The whole process is monotonous if it happens more than once.
The same is true of the tutorials, which are incredibly lengthy but don’t do an especially good job of explaining how the positions of cards in the deck, the order in which you pick them up, or how they’re dealt all fits together. This is likely a personal issue, in that if you have a better mental picture of how a deck is constructed in your head you will face less problems – but I’ve been playing card games for nearly half my life at this point, I feel like the confusion isn’t all on me..
None of these issues would be problematic in a vacuum, but combined they give a feeling of a lack of polish, of a good idea not refined enough. It’s especially frustrating because obviously cheating at cards to take money from the 18th century French aristocracy shortly before they all meet Madame Guillotine is a great idea for a game. Playing an unassuming mute who is slowly dragged into a world he doesn’t understand, his thoughts coming between each game in the form of journal entries, is superb.
It is not the first time, and is extremely unlikely to be the last, that a Devolver-published game has had too much style for its substance. They have a habit of not putting enough time into making things actually fun to play rather than just enjoyable to look at and think about. It means you’re likely to be satisfied with what’s there if the story and setting are intriguing enough for you, but won’t be otherwise.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
