From: Nerial
For: Switch
Rating: ★★★★
The story takes place in 18th century France and follows a mute peasant who is pulled out of his ordinary life into a world of swindling, trickery, and cheating by Comte de Saint Germain, an experienced con artist who becomes somewhat of a mentor and father figure to the boy. A neat detail is the journal, written by the main character, which starts out as hardly readable, as expected from a peasant, and slowly grows as he is taught language. A small gripe is that the game gives you plenty of choices, but a lot of those seem to do naught but give you an extra bit of dialogue or two; it’s extremely linear.
The main gameplay is participating in the tricks and cheats your character comes to learn. Using precise analog stick movements and timed button presses, you manipulate cards or send signals to an accomplice to win an increasing amount of money, usually from some French nobility. You learn a new skill every time you go to a new area, usually a continuation of the skills you have developed so far. Eventually you’ll have to merge several tricks together in order to win. It is a lot of stuff to remember, so thankfully the game reminds you of the controls in the pause menu.
To add a constant pressure to the proceedings, there is a suspicion meter. This slowly fills as you are shuffling cards or sending signals, so you want to be quick about it. Getting the suspicion meter filled too high leads to you being kicked out of the place you’re trying to rob — or just being straight-up killed, keeping the suspense high throughout. Interestingly, failing to execute a cheat either on purpose or by accident will reduce the suspicion meter, so dropping a round here and there might be required.
The main issue with this game stems from bugs. I’m not sure if it’s just a Switch thing or not, but the game crashed multiple times during my time with it, and there were several times where the analog stick movements happened on their own and I couldn’t do anything. This wasn’t just classic JoyCon drift — there was an issue in the game which I always had to restart for. This came to a head when a cutscene was playing and then my character would not move. I have restarted the game several times, but alas, my character remained frozen, bringing my playthrough to a cruel end where it seemed close to finishing.
Card Shark continues a long held tradition in video games: being the "bad" guy is always fun. Swindling characters out of their pocket change is always satisfying, especially when they talk a big game and devolve into an angry mess as they start losing. While the game does throw you into the deep end at points, and I was unable to finish it because of a game-ending bug, I still really enjoyed my time with this and recommend it to all prospective card sharks out there.
By Michael Robertson
