If you love cheaply made poorly paced visual novel adventures with mostly inconsequential but still present gameplay, you've gotta pick this one up.

tl;dr: cool concept, but suffers from poor storytelling, imbalanced gameplay, and contains "fan disservice", get Balatro instead
Minor spoilers for the first chapter I suppose.

I decided to give this game a try in part because I found the publisher's other works to generally be good quality indie titles, and in part because I fancy myself a decent poker player. As of this review, I have completed the game in its entirety in half a day, and found it to be lacking in both quality and actual poker.

If the game did one thing decently, it would be the aesthetic presentation. While basic and nothing to write home about, with a plethora of reused sprites and some annoying menu interfaces, there is overall nothing that detracts from the core content. There are some nice CGs, and the Live2D rigging is pretty solid. The music does its job, though is overall not very memorable.

However, in terms of gameplay, many of the mechanics are unintuitive or made unnecessarily complicated, even for someone familiar with poker. The "multiplier" carries over between rounds while your chips may be returned, which makes "pot size" highly unintuitive to navigate between rounds. Stack sizes seem to be whatever the developer thought looked cool, resulting in stacks ranging anywhere from 100BBs to 1000BBs; players might wonder why the same hand barely dents one boss but gets themselves instantly killed in another. The multiplier cap also seems somewhat arbitrary, and largely feels like it's only there to prevent you from killing yourself in scripted losses too early. Bosses will disable your skills whenever appropriate for the plot, which is generally guessable but not always. Credits generally carry over between parts of the game, but the one time I farmed a billion credits they were immediately lost going to the next part. The list of frustrations goes on and on.

In addition, the balancing of the poker game is quite poor: some skills like "hand damage boost" are absolutely worthless, and some skills like "make the opponent fold" cost way too much for what is not a very strong effect. Meanwhile, you get access to "tutor the perfect card" and "prevent opponent folding" in chapter 1, and it lets you consistently OHKO any non-boss (or phase change any boss) in the game once you have a good drawing hand. This meant that my strategy every game was to fold literally any hand until I got enough "luck" (mana), keep folding until I drew into a good setup, then one-shot opponents who have zero counterplay. Due to how the multiplier system works, I think this is far more consistent than trying to actually engage with any of the other poker mechanics.

As for the storytelling, I found that the themes of the story were delivered in a very heavy-handed manner, but somehow still managed to undermine themselves throughout the game. A large part of the MC's ideology--which we are expected to root for--is built around the notion of gambling for the thrill of uncertainty and chance, but everything from rigged story combats to skills guaranteeing the perfect card seem to force you into doing the opposite. There is some attempt at commentary on social and wealth inequality, but it ends up going absolutely nowhere, and the MC ends up the richest person in the city and probably the world by the end of the game.

Additionally, the game features what I can only describe as "fan disservice" throughout the game, where you watch your opponents (or yourself, if you lose) be put through Dangonronpa-style executions befitting their characters. I personally think they are presented in a really uncomfortable and fetishized light; the first execution, for instance, gives us a full-color CG--inflation art of a young girl being forcibly fed until her stomach explodes. While unlike the previous issues, I cannot say this is an objectively bad design choice, I really don't think it adds anything to the game and makes me wonder why we put so much of the art budget into this.

While the core concept of the game is good, and there's a lot of good ideas here that could have made it into a good game, the end product is something that isn't really satisfying on any front. Would not recommend spending your money on this when Balatro is the same price and far more worthwhile.

It has Yuri in it

This game isn't for me, its just danganropa with poker basically.
Story isnt too interesting, every chapter basically plays out the same, weird fetish-style deaths for each character and yourself when you lose. Main positive is the character/art design is top notch, but other than that the rest of the game is just bland.

Once you understand how the magic poker works, it's just busyworks. Play this just if you understand what "menhera yandere yuri death game VN" means and think that's in your wheelhouse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I'd never played Texas hold 'em in my entire fat bastard's life.
It just needed to add some anime gremlins to lure me in.
Now I'm a pro gambler.

PSA: THIS IS NOT BALATRO WITH ANIME WAIFUS

I think a lot of people picked this up thinking it would be Balatro with tiddy PNGs and that is very much not the case. This is quite solidly an adventure game-style visual novel, which means there's 'free time' to just play poker if you want to build up your bankroll, but it also means that there are times during the confrontations with the chapter bosses where you'll be railroaded into certain actions (usually near the middle of the game).
Where this game differs from a typical headsup Texas holdem game is the Abyss Rule: each bet or raise increases a multiplier, which remains in play until the game goes to a showdown. This multiplier is also used as a penalty (multiplying the blind) if you fold, which changes the math quite a bit and may force you (or your opponent) to go into a showdown you don't want because you literally can't afford to fold. This causes games to end more quickly and generally makes the game easier for amateurs. The Abyss Rule also tends to reduce the size of both players' stacks over time: chips lost through the multiplier are gone for good (only chips in the pot are won).
In terms of the VN portions, you'll be given a warning about the upcoming boss and need to spend your time figuring out how you're going to stop them from cheating against you (or at least nullify or reduce the effects), which may involve chains of deals with various characters around the Gambling District.

Big change from the demo is that the 'potion' items have been removed - this is a good one since those made dealing with aspects of the game very easy; there are some recovery effects, but they're now tied to expensive skills.

Regarding the execution scenes, I would have liked to see Danganronpa style animations, rather than CGs with text, but the game staff on this one is three men and a dog so it can't really be helped. As is traditional for ryona games, losing to a Witch will also unlock an execution for Asuha (and a cheevo). These scenes are added in a 'report' which can be accessed from the gallery, and the game asks you if you want to read them when you get them (so you can skip them if you're not interested).

If you're a fan of Japanese gambling works like the works of Fukumoto, there's a lot here for you (chapter 3 has an extended homage to Kaiji, for example); if that's not you, you'll probably get a lot less out of this unless you're a big fan of gesugao or jiraikei.

I told God I'm a gambler and that prevented them from cheating with their God powers.

8 hours in and its pretty middling, alot of the fetish torture scenes appeal to me but that is not enough to say the game is "good". The backgrounds look terrible so its not surprising to see the AI disclaimer, and all the investigation and poker game stuff is dull. Even if we concede this is a disguised porn game I've definitely seen porn doujins and eroge with good storytelling, which this does not have. The character designs are ok but the characters themselves are not all that interesting, the villains have their one trick and its cute but there's little beyond that, none of the 'emotional' stuff lands properly.

Full playthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAFtZ4pMPIc6q5UDX1tkCJJ15Vm2CLZ3v
Edit; The final boss absolutely sucked and I really hated it.

Overall the character designs are great and it's a good intro to poker I wish the boss fight were more poker based instead of Dangan ronpa investigation based though where the match is basically scripted and you just select the right choices there's no poker in it so the main poker aspect really only comes from the construction site I've seen so far. Even the poker royale from my experience the opposing players just constantly bet because you don't regain chips between matches which kinda takes the skill out of being able to get a tell from the players as even if they have absolutely nothing they raise or call if you all in. The game is incredibly wordy as well I think they could have been more succinct and it would have made the game much better, but I think it's still worth the price and enjoyable.