Card Shark has drawn many comparisons, at least as far as I've seen, to WarioWare, and I think it's a comparison with a lot of merit to it in some way: cheating at card games is done in a multitude of ways, and there are a lot of techniques you get taught throughout the course of the game, such as various ways of shuffling, dealing, how to mark a card for yourself, or how to signal valuable information to another player. One way of conceptualising these is as a set of independent mini-games, requiring specific inputs to succeed; you are taught a technique and given as long as you like to practice it, before stepping into 17th Century France to attempt to pull it off for real, with the additional pressure of real people and their scrutinous gaze. The difference here is that you will use one technique for one "level", repeating the technique the requisite three times in order to successfully strip your mark of as much gold (or, I suppose it would be livre?) as you possibly can while avoiding detection. It's tempting to suggest that there should have been a bit more variety in these techniques - really, each one you learn and catalog is a combination of smaller techniques, and I think there could be some room for expression and creative combination to make your own full techniques - but the method presented helps to keep you on your toes as you pivot from strategy to strategy while trying to generate funds.
I will readily admit that I found the intersection of narrative and gameplay absolutely gripping; to briefly get you up to speed on the narrative premise, you play a peasant boy from a small village who is swept up by the Comte de Saint-Germain into the French aristocracy, whereupon you and your new partner intend to lie, cheat and steal your way to both financial and political success. Along the way you meet various significant historical figures, and become enveloped in plots and intrigue. The story plays out in little snippets of dialogue in between rounds of the popular card game of the era, the specifics of which are completely abstracted away from you, the player, to much benefit. Playing Solitaire with Voltaire would be frightfully boring; taking all of his copper, on the other hand? Exhilarating.
Presentation is really the keyword for Card Shark, which feels very appropriate given that it's all about cheating at cards; it's all well and good knowing and understanding various forms of cheating cards, but you need to know how to do it discretely, use distraction, subterfuge, seize the smallest windows of opportunity to give yourself the upper hand and, if you're feeling especially confident, your opponent the lower hand. Something I really like about Card Shark is the double impact of both the lovely painterly aesthetic, evoking baroque paintings - of the very era in which we find our protagonist - and the visual presentation resembling a stage play with you in the audience for it all; often times a character will enter another room, which will then be transitioned as a parallel to the former, which looks superb and really evokes the idea of a stage play. It's even backed with a beautifully composed soundtrack; one highlight is the piece which plays when learning a new technique from your mentor, a suitably think-y tune that matches the atmosphere of preparing for a night of deception in high society.
It's a really nice combination of all the various aesthetic choices which combine with the gameplay to make a really compelling experience altogether; there's a moment early in the game where a fatal accident results in the Comte profiting financially, which is presented by the UI akin to as if you had just won at the card game you had been playing moments earlier; might have just been a convenient way of signifying you had earned money, but there's something I really liked about this way of presenting the information, like everything was nothing more than a game to Comte, and so you must too embrace that mindset. There's an even greater example of this sort of narrative design, that I really don't want to spoil, so I'll just tell you: Death is not the end.
I played Card Shark over the course of four nights, stopping for the night each time I reached the end of a chapter - it's funny to think of each break like an intermission - and was thoroughly engrossed the entire time. You won't learn much about French history, despite the presence of real historical figures, but you might learn a thing or two about cheating at cards, even if its just knowing you'd be terrible at it, like me.
I will readily admit that I found the intersection of narrative and gameplay absolutely gripping; to briefly get you up to speed on the narrative premise, you play a peasant boy from a small village who is swept up by the Comte de Saint-Germain into the French aristocracy, whereupon you and your new partner intend to lie, cheat and steal your way to both financial and political success. Along the way you meet various significant historical figures, and become enveloped in plots and intrigue. The story plays out in little snippets of dialogue in between rounds of the popular card game of the era, the specifics of which are completely abstracted away from you, the player, to much benefit. Playing Solitaire with Voltaire would be frightfully boring; taking all of his copper, on the other hand? Exhilarating.
Presentation is really the keyword for Card Shark, which feels very appropriate given that it's all about cheating at cards; it's all well and good knowing and understanding various forms of cheating cards, but you need to know how to do it discretely, use distraction, subterfuge, seize the smallest windows of opportunity to give yourself the upper hand and, if you're feeling especially confident, your opponent the lower hand. Something I really like about Card Shark is the double impact of both the lovely painterly aesthetic, evoking baroque paintings - of the very era in which we find our protagonist - and the visual presentation resembling a stage play with you in the audience for it all; often times a character will enter another room, which will then be transitioned as a parallel to the former, which looks superb and really evokes the idea of a stage play. It's even backed with a beautifully composed soundtrack; one highlight is the piece which plays when learning a new technique from your mentor, a suitably think-y tune that matches the atmosphere of preparing for a night of deception in high society.
It's a really nice combination of all the various aesthetic choices which combine with the gameplay to make a really compelling experience altogether; there's a moment early in the game where a fatal accident results in the Comte profiting financially, which is presented by the UI akin to as if you had just won at the card game you had been playing moments earlier; might have just been a convenient way of signifying you had earned money, but there's something I really liked about this way of presenting the information, like everything was nothing more than a game to Comte, and so you must too embrace that mindset. There's an even greater example of this sort of narrative design, that I really don't want to spoil, so I'll just tell you: Death is not the end.
I played Card Shark over the course of four nights, stopping for the night each time I reached the end of a chapter - it's funny to think of each break like an intermission - and was thoroughly engrossed the entire time. You won't learn much about French history, despite the presence of real historical figures, but you might learn a thing or two about cheating at cards, even if its just knowing you'd be terrible at it, like me.