Card Shark is a delightful lesson in history and cheating

polygon.com:

There’s a sumptuous, lived-in feel to Card Shark, a witty and pleasantly stressful game that casts you as a gambler and a cheat, cutting a swath through 18th-century French society. The writing is rich with humor and period detail, and the woodcut-style artwork has a rough, expressive texture and a candlelit glow. You can almost taste the wine and smell the straw.

Set to be released on Steam and Nintendo Switch on June 2, Card Shark is a collaboration between Nerial — the Devolver Digital-owned developer of Reigns, a medieval-monarch simulator — and the artist Nicolai Troshinsky. It pairs Nerial’s sharp, colorful writing and simple gesture mechanics with Troshinsky’s luminous artwork, where the characters are animated like shadow puppets.

This artistry is used in the service of a wonderfully specific and flavorful storyline, inspired by Troshinsky’s interest in card manipulation and his love of the 1975 Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. The player assumes the role of a mute serving boy in a lowly tavern in the southern French town of Pau. One day, an apparently well-to-do patron, the Comte de Saint-Germain, catches the young man’s eye and draws him into helping with running a scam on a game of cards. When the game ends in violence, the boy flees with this enigmatic gentleman and joins his life on the road, conning gamblers in one parlor after another as he pursues the truth behind a rumored royal conspiracy with a ridiculous name: The Twelve Bottles of Milk.

(The Comte de Saint-Germain is a historical figure — although he went by many names, his origins remain mysterious, and his accomplishments, adventures, and the claims made by and about him are so outlandish as to strain credulity. This imagined version of him is