it might be a little unintuitive that card shark isn't a card game; but then, it might also be terribly obvious.

card shark is a game about cheating people out of their money. specifically, it's a game about taking the french aristocracy for suckers whilst trying to avoid becoming a victim yourself of the schemes and violence around you. the cards are just the tool by which you do this, the game being played with them never committing to a consistent ruleset; high value cards are good? having a lot of a suit is good? knowing someone's high card allows you to beat them? it's all a bit abstract. you win or lose solely by your ability to glean and signal information you're not supposed to have, to palm cards, to do a good bad job shuffling.

the game's more of a visual novel about deception than it is a scoundrels-cheating-across-the-country simulator; there's the odd occasion where you can show up to a game without plot, and make some decisions of your own about what con you run in a given hand, but for the most part you chase a handful of plot threads as the tricks you have to pull step up in complexity and start intermingling. the sleights are well researched, and in practice (at least on the middle difficulty; can't speak as to the other two) strike a decent balance between giving you enough guidance in the heat of the moment to keep you moving forward without holding your hand so much as to cheapen your success. some of them are definitely more stressful than others to perform under scrutiny. top sifting...ugh...

as of time of writing (it's 4 am, so technically it's not release day any more :v) the controls are a little temperamental even on pad like it recommends, and i've had a few situations where clicking on something to interact while walking around doesn't do its thing and sometimes results in a soft lock, but it's never been anything quitting back to the title screen hasn't fixed, and apparently a debug command to force restart a scene was left in whilst lingering bugs get pinned down.

it might be a little unintuitive that card shark isn't a card game; but then, it might also be terribly obvious. card shark is a game about cheating people out of their money. specifically, it's a game about taking the french aristocracy for suckers whilst trying to avoid becoming a victim yourself of the schemes and violence around you. the cards are just the tool by which you do this, the game being played with them never committing to a consistent ruleset; high value cards are good? having a lot of a suit is good? knowing someone's high card allows you to beat them? it's all a bit abstract. you win or lose solely by your ability to glean and signal information you're not supposed to have, to palm cards, to do a good bad job shuffling. the game's more of a visual novel about deception than it is a scoundrels-cheating-across-the-country simulator; there's the odd occasion where you can show up to a game without plot, and make some decisions of your own about what con you run in a given hand, but for the most part you chase a handful of plot threads as the tricks you have to pull step up in complexity and start intermingling. the sleights are well researched, and in practice (at least on the middle difficulty; can't speak as to the other two) strike a decent balance between giving you enough guidance in the heat of the moment to keep you moving forward without holding your hand so much as to cheapen your success. some of them are definitely more stressful than others to perform under scrutiny. top sifting...ugh... as of time of writing (it's 4 am, so technically it's not release day any more :v) the controls are a little temperamental even on pad like it recommends, and i've had a few situations where clicking on something to interact while walking around doesn't do its thing and sometimes results in a soft lock, but it's never been anything quitting back to the title screen hasn't fixed, and apparently a debug command to force restart a scene was left in whilst lingering bugs get pinned down.