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