Card Shark is unlike any other digital card game, because it isn’t one at all – Review

gamepur.com:

The player character begins Card Shark impoverished. A nameless mute, this young man earns pennies working tables in rural France. Taken under the wing of the real-life philosopher and trickster Comte de St-Germain, this young vagabond becomes a learned and expert con-man. Together, they’ll travel across 18th century France, cheat the wealthy out of their excess, and investigate a mystery that involves the heart of the aristocracy.

The game features, as the marketing touts, real card tricks. I don’t have the expertise to fully confirm or deny this claim, but they certainly feel real, requiring simulated sleight of hand, memorization, and constant learning and re-learning. The game uses a total of 28 tricks. Some are expansions and iterations on previous tricks, others bring in entirely new systems. It would be easy to characterize Card Shark as a mini-game collection, a set of separate games and ideas. This would be a mistake.

Cheating at cards builds out a language of play as comprehensive as any eight-hour game can be. Each “minigame” relies on memorization and problem-solving. In some exhilarating moments, unexpected wrinkles will appear in planned tricks, forcing you to rely on past knowledge to get through. There’s even a permanent death difficulty mode, letting you take your struggles and expertise to a simulative extreme. Because each of the scams relies on some common knowledge and a skill-set, almost every minigame is an expansion of a central idea.

As a result, Card Shark feels like almost nothing else I’ve played. Especially now, card games flood storefronts across the industry, but the cards here are more metaphor than practicality. Competitive games like Hearthstone or Runeterra