Sultan’s Game is a dark, fascinating, and irrepressibly horny oddity

rockpapershotgun.com:

I predict I likely won’t have fully gotten to grips with the strategy of Sultan’s Game for several more hours, but since I’m considering investing that time - after a morning spent card shuffling and deciding whomst to bone and whomst to murder in its Steam demo - I’m compelled to spotlight it. It’s deeply imperfect and willfully obtuse, but also absolutely fascinating. I’ll ground you with a slightly wonky and dull allusion to Cultist Simulator, then guide you through in more or less the order I experienced it. As we progress, you may feel steadily more disorientated. It’ll be like a brewery tour I’ve somehow inherited control of by murder-boning the previous owners. Onward!

The art itself is gorgeous, sitting somewhere between Hades’s multi-hued, drive-by horniness and Yoshitaka Amano’s 1001 Nights, and the soundtrack also does a great job scene setting. For the tutorial - which, I must add, is only really a tutorial for about 30% of the game - you take control of the Sultan. He’s bored of all earthly pleasures, until one day a magician arrives at the door with a box of cards. The cards come in four flavours: carnality, bloodshed, conquest, and extravagance. Each also has a value like 'gold' or 'silver'. To fulfil a card, you need to find a target of equal value to enact it upon. There’s also an option to attempt to bone the tutorial magician, which I picked out of curiosity only. It doesn’t work, anyway.

That the Sultan is a real piece of shit is something I picked up around the time he snapped the neck of the consort with whom he resolved his initial 'carnality' card. The next I got was a gold 'bloodshed' card, which meant I had to personally murder a gold tier character from my court. As you quickly realise, your courtiers here are resources, There’s an almost Frostpunk-ish efficient tyranny to it all. Many resource management games use some sort of population-as-spendables system, but both the art and the focus in the writing here mean that you do get at least