Card Shark Review | GamersGlobal.de

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As a servant in pre-revolutionary France, you learn the art of card tricks, cheat your way into the circles of the nobility and uncover a secret.

All screenshots and game scenes are from GamersGlobal

Developer Nerial was through reigns known (Reigns – Game of Thrones in the test). In it, you direct the fortunes of a kingdom by sliding event cards left or right to make decisions, balancing four stats like citizen happiness and money (and avoiding making powerful enemies that will lead you straight to an early death) . The developer’s new game is also about cards, but in a completely different way.

The idea for Card Shark came to the animator, filmmaker and game designer Nicolai Troshinskywhile researching card game scams. He joined in Arnaud de Bock (Creative Director at Nerial) to come up with a gameplay concept using these real card tricks. You do this in the role of a young man who is introduced to the world of swindlers by his master and thus discovers the secrets of the nobility in France on the eve of the French Revolution. Will an unusual indie hit succeed or have the developers gambled away?

Between rounds of card games, dialogue drives the story forward. You have to swallow that all the important characters have a gambling problem and also reveal their secrets to anyone who just rips them off in a shady way.

The Servant and the Comte

Your master in the deceitful arts is none other than the infamous Comte de Saint-Germain, a purported nobleman and alchemist. He was a sore thumb of his time, around which various legends are entwined. Your imposter career alongside Saint Germain turns out to be an interesting mix of narrative and card game sequences. The funny thing is that it’s completely unclear what your master is playing, because you always focus on cheating so that he gets certain cards or finds out what an opponent’s hand is.

With almost every victim you control on the world map (you often have a small selection, but the progression is linear), you learn a new trick: There are a total of 28 pieces, with some advanced techniques only expanding well-known tricks. The scam starts easy. This is how you look at your opponent’s cards and use certain movements when wiping the table to signal the most common suit in his hand. Later methods become more sophisticated and span multiple stages. So you have to play cards in such a way that high ones are bent one way and low ones are bent the other way. You then let the bent card with a high value disappear up your sleeve with a quicktime event and then shuffle it upwards in a targeted manner.

Card Shark reminded me a bit Wario Ware, because the tricks are basically a series of mini/micro games (some skill tests are also about something other than card cheating). Card Shark is optimized for controller control and does a lot with the left stick. In order to shuffle cards in certain places, I have to perform a sequence of stick movements (down is regular shuffling, right lets a card protrude, up shuffles only the top part of the deck). Elsewhere, through practice, I’m learning the right stick angle to throw cards reliably. With its (not too demanding) stick acrobatics, Card Shark is the clear opposite of Reigns with its simple Tinder swipe principle in terms of operation.

The code “Twelve bottles of milk” appears early on, but only after about an hour and a half does the Comte open up a bit and at least roughly reveal what secret agenda he is pursuing in addition to raking in money.

Don’t get caught

Don’t take my Wario-Ware comparison too literally: it doesn’t get as hectic as the Nintendo series. You can’t take too much time on the standard difficulty or the suspicion bar at the bottom of the image will grow rapidly and your cheating will be exposed, but Card Shark is merciful enough, even when I’m quite obviously looking for a specific card, the bar only increases slowly . If, on the other hand, I hesitate when mixing, which can be done quite quickly, my distrust increases quickly. But in many games you can also lose the second round of three, so that the suspicion decreases (partly I did this out of pity for certain victims). On the other hand, there is no luck factor: as soon as a step in the trick goes wrong, your master will be forced to lose the round – or worse: an obvious cheat will be exposed immediately.

Two things make it easier to cheat: First, you can practice each new trick indefinitely. But while I could easily learn certain sequences of stick movements for fake shuffling, I couldn’t memorize dead-end codes. Was it hearts or spades in the circle? The second big help is the interface, which shows what my code means on the standard difficulty level and whether I’m shuffling certain cards in the right place. Nevertheless, at some points I lost my nerve or confused something. Sometimes I have to swindle the minimum bet for a revenge elsewhere. Sometimes your life is at stake. Thankfully, Death is a gambler, so he’ll rewind time for you if you defeat him with card tricks.

The lowest level of difficulty increases suspicion more slowly, while the highest level introduces perma-death and removes the visual aids. That would no longer be for me, since I failed in part because I couldn’t remember a single card from the victim’s hand over an intermediate step…

I can make money again in the barn if I don’t have enough for the minimum bets. The method is also up to me. But without the narrative framework, it’s less exciting to do old tricks again.

Unusual style

Visually, Card Shark is characterized by an unusual graphic style. The artistically skilled Troshinsky created the look using the monoprinting technique and the colorful backdrops are very atmospheric, especially since the Comte and his servant visit all sorts of places; from monasteries to magnificent sites of the nobility to the island of Corsica. Another nice optical detail of the illustrations: Since the protagonist is mute, his answer options in dialogues are always displayed in the form of subtitled images of exaggerated facial expressions or hand gestures.

Unfortunately, you have to do without any voice output acoustically. However, the texts are translated into German, with only a few clerical errors in the text version. Elsewhere, Card Shark shines for this. How does the orchestral soundtrack of Andrea Boccadoro best describe it with 40 songs (some original compositions, some historical pieces)? I’m falling
forced a citation of the troupe Luke miracle on, from Deutschlandfunk YOLO by WTFM 100,zero: “By the way, what also really fucks up: chamber music. Check out some Gucci-style preludes. Bad sun, I tell you.”

Author: Hagen Gehritz (GamersGlobal)

Opinion: Hagen Gehritz

The historical setting, the fine chamber music soundtrack, the special graphic style of Nicholai Trochinsky and the skill-demanding, realistic tricks: With these basic ingredients, Card Shark really picks me up.

The characters are interesting and the story makes you curious, but Card Shark doesn’t let himself be looked at in the story for a long time, so the start seems aimless and later on it progresses quite leisurely. I can only donate the money won to the allied Roma. They can love it, but there is only a vague explanation that it should do something good later on, while milestone donation goals are missing as a motivational element.

But what rather dampened my enthusiasm: After a failure, it takes too long before the second attempt. Because of the constant saving, I then have to collect money or defeat death and then start the scene all over again. This gets really annoying with a few mini-games that cannot be operated precisely enough. But in part it was just my goldfish-level memory when, at an intermediate step, I’d already forgotten which card I was supposed to remember.

A last point of criticism is the uniform process: dialogue scene, practice of a trick and card game alternate constantly and apart from that there are almost no possibilities for interaction. But in addition to the increasing complexity of the mini-games, the card games remain interesting through twists, encounters with VIPs like Voltaire or dramatic moments. Despite the weak points, I had some fun with the unusual indie title.

CARD SHARK personal computer