Losing even one round at the higher-stakes games can mean losing all of your gold in one go, and revisiting the earlier levels are just not engaging enough to bother with. Starting from about halfway through, I made use of the handy difficulty feature that offered to skip the gameplay after failing at the round at least once. By and large, each scene plays out in a similar manner. There are some brilliant moments of subversion where you use your newfound sleight-of-hand skills to make it seem like someone else at the table is the cheat, but these are few and far between. My interest in the story certainly outlasted my interest in the gameplay, which had about halfway through begun to feel a little one-note.
My feelings on the Comté frequently changed, as he was at first revealed to be a cheat, then a sort of Robin Hood, then a father figure to the protagonist, then something else that I won’t spoil for you. “Once you’ve learned so many of the game’s tricks, actions start to repeat themselves and it all begins to blur together.”
#CARD SHARK MEANING UPGRADE#
It seems like a missed opportunity to deck the protagonist out in fancy clothes or to upgrade the carriage you use to travel from one location to another. The only thing you can do with your hard ‘earned’ cash other than spend it on more gambling, and that to basically donate it to charity, for which you don’t get anything tangible as a reward. Card Shark could have used something else to keep one revisiting taverns and really raking up the dough. There is no other gameplay beyond these tricks: you can re-visit some areas to earn more money, but there’s little incentive to do so. The simplicity of these controls also means that once you’ve learned so many of the game’s tricks, actions start to repeat themselves and it all begins to blur together. The motion detection in just one or two of the tricks seems off too, like when a side-to-side motion registers as a clockwise circle a few too many times to be a one-off glitch. The complexity of some of the harder tricks can be especially confusing, and you can end up following the directions blindly like you’re playing a game of Simon Says without actually understanding what you’re doing. When all you’re doing is twiddling the joystick or clicking the mouse in various sequences, it can be difficult to follow along with exactly how the deck is being manipulated. The actions themselves are always simple, but they can sometimes be a little too abstract as a result.
“Both the gorgeous 2D art style and the soundtrack set the scene immediately.” Make a wrong move, and you’ll lose the round. The difficulty comes from trying to work quickly to steal aces, identify high-value cards, and keep track of cards in the deck while avoiding suspicion from your opponent. It really gives you an appreciation for just how much dexterity would be required to perform the tricks at a real table without giving your game away.Įach trick is controlled using simple button presses and joystick movement, though you can also use mouse controls. The card tricks you learn throughout the game are real tricks of card manipulation that can be performed in real life, although these days they are the tool of stage magicians rather than actual cheats. The tutorial in each trick is usually concise and effective, so you can normally follow along well enough, and you can practice the trick for as long as you like before starting the level. They start off easy and simple to understand but quickly get more complex as the tricks begin to have multiple, more complicated steps. With each new leg of your journey across France, The curious Comté teaches you a new trick that you’ll be using against your unsuspecting opponents.
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