After a dull opening act spent cleaning tables, the playpen made of WarioWare busywork gives way to la terreur when suddenly you're left to your own devices, combining the comte's mega-microgames into tangible thoughtlines that video games don't often afford us; now we're suddenly playing with the cards adults use!

Later sections often take a psychic toll upon the gamer's undeveloped brain, and it's only right that a game about the pyrrhic toll of cheating eventually becomes so mind-destroying that you end up looking at videos showing you how to cheat at cheating - any% WR for this game is just a guy turning on cheats and then letting the dialogue roll for 50 mins.

Don't want to spoil the potential endings for anyone (because this game is hinging quite a lot on its so-so-story), but I'm glad the developers were following my train of thought as it pulled into Epilogue Station. Bravo gentlemen! The first person to combine this gameplay with an existing card game is gonna clean out the gambling hall. I wanna slip-cut a Pot of Greed into a Yu-Gi-Oh draw deck while sipping a glass of Gamer Fuel.

Ehhhhh. its ok. Interesting premise and art but I was wanting a bit more out of the game. Maybe actually getting to be a card shark playing poker sometimes instead of just learning card tricks but not really getting to see the context.

Actually having to time out your cheats during a game of poker would have been fun. I guess I was just expecting more

6/10

A lovely game about cheating at cards. I think personally this game excels at everything it's trying to do and everything it's trying to do is absolutely my shit. The art is beautiful and makes it a treat to go to new areas and meet new characters. Another reason it's such a treat to meet new characters is the games writing, I found every character in the game to be compelling to play with. Whether it be a funny encounter with 3 people who have more money then they know what to do with it, or it being a casual game of cards with a young man down on his luck that eventually brings him to ruining his life. I won't say much on the story itself other then that I think it's a very compelling mystery. As for the gameplay itself I think it's pretty good both in it actually being pretty fun and a proper challenge as it goes on. Now overall I feel this game was absolutely amazing and you should play it if you want a very compelling story about deceit and betrayal with some WarioWare style minigames about cheating with cards attached.

PS: the only reason why I'm not giving this game a perfect score is that for some reason I started having a bug happen where it would read A button inputs before pressed even before I did anything which caused me to fail a minigame once or twice

I LOVED this game. One of my favourite tropes in books/TV shows/movies is the con artist character.

Here, you have a whole group of them, teaching you how to do REAL tricks and cons, with cards, coins and more, to rake in some money.

It doesn't stop there though, this is actually, primarily, a game about the story, which is a masterful alternate history tale with political intrigue and drama that could rival game of thrones.

The art style put me off at first, but along with the music, it really serves to just suck you in to the story and I now think it is fantastic.

This is vastly underrated and one of my favourite games.

A fun little game! As far as I can tell, it shows you how to accomplish quite a few legit card sharp techniques, which is cool. The setting is neat, and the characters are all quite fun as well.
The one stumbling block is that it has the "Math Test" problem. That is, you are taught the basics of a technique, then under pressure have to reproduce them. This is fine at first, but then twists and variations are added which, in theory, are merely applications of what you already know. In practice, the game never gives you a good enough grounding to feel confident in these new techniques. And it's asking you to do them for the first time with a lot on the line. The second-to-last sequence is the only one where this is a big problem. I had to attempt it three times, failing and getting a game over each time. By the way, the game over screen is cute, but tedious in repetition.

That is a long paragraph for what is ultimately a small complaint. It's a fun game! Worthy of being checked out by anyone.

My expectations going into this game were that it was about remembering many different tricks to use to fool your opponents in a card game to scam them out of money, and that is exactly what it is. So my expectations where matched, what's the problem? Well when I play a game, I think it's important for it to subvert your expectations in some way and add onto what many people's pre-conceived notions of that game might be. I think that by not doing this, your game may end up feeling a bit bland, and for me, that's what I felt with this game. Now that sounds pretty harsh, and for many games, I think failing to change things up would probably result in a bad game, but with Card Shark, because the concept is so simple, it doesn't end up hurting it as much as it could. There are a couple main techniques for tricking your opponent, shuffeling, sneaking glances, and stacking the deck. All of the tricks end up being variants of theses three techniques, but performed in slightly different ways and in slightly different orders. This core loop of learning different techniques is pretty satisfying, and it does feel great to pull it off when youre also trying to remember 5 other card tricks at the same time. The game also has a great visual and audio style which really help to elevate the aesthetics of the game to be very memorable. At the end of the day, that's all you really want out of a game, a satisfying gameplay loop and a cohesive aesthetic. Could the game have provided more depth in the mechanics? Probably, but for a short experience overall, I think this was pretty solid.