Really cute game. The card gameplay was very satisfying and does an excellent job making you feel like you're learning and mastering a card trick. The story is kind of a popcorn read, but it's enjoyably written and very charming. The soundtrack and art direction were really excellent as well. I wish it was a little longer and maybe that it committed more in its story, but I also feel like it was a decent length so as not to overstay its welcome.

My main complaint is that some of the late game card tricks are frustratingly fiddly, namely the false riffle shuffle and the tricks involving rifling through the deck looking for specific cards.

Overall a very enjoyable little game.

A really ingeniously designed neo-roguelike/strategy game, and one of the few games I've ever seen people write elaborate chess-style treatises about & argue about the efficacy of different strategies ten years down the line.

It's quite complicated, and is to a certain extent not quite what it looks like on the box--I myself was a little caught off guard by the winning strategy being "murder as many people as you can, if at all possible personally"--so I don't blame anyone who can't get into it. But for me, it really scratches an itch that nothing else ever has, in that it really makes you feel like the commander at the bridge, giving orders to divert power from engines and slamming your fist down on the arm of your chair when that one-in-a-million shot hits you anyway, but where it's also a game that's at its heart about slow, carefully thought-out tactical and strategic decisions, rather than the combination of reflexes and split-second gut decisions games where you're running a ship are usually like.

three main problems:
- everyone is named "Gaius Julius Ususus" and has the same portrait, so it's impossible to tell anybody apart, making the constant popups about court intrigue incomprehensible
- speed 5 runs so fast the game's unplayable but speed 4 is painfully slow
- the way barbarians spawn means you can get sacked in the first decade by a huge landless army twice your size and can't do shit about it, like ck2 adventurers on steroids

other than that it's still real rough and the mechanics &c. have basically zero documentation online. would not recommend

I thought this seemed kind of interesting, and I really did want to like it. I went in assuming it was "Ace Attorney but you're the judge", an expectation which was quickly dashed. Initially I was receptive to the idea of a game with more open-ended mystery writing, where you have incentives to betray your own conscience, but after a while the game mostly being meter juggling reputation management started to get to me, but I was prepared to settle in for the long haul regardless.

At this point, I assumed the game was done introducing new mechanics wholesale, which set the stage for the revelation that on top of this already weirdly elaborate onion-layered premise, there is also a vaguely mobile game-style city-builder/territory management thing, which all your 20 different reputation meters feed into. I dropped it immediately at that point; maybe that part is actually good, but I felt kind of lied to about what sort of game this was going to be, and the game already felt like it was having enough of an identity crisis as it was. Maybe I'll take a second stab at it someday but I was mostly just tired by my initial experience with the game.