Card Shark - A Gaming Diary

Review:

Card Shark is a brilliant game.  Utilizing various combinations of control stick movement, button combos, and quick-time events, it creates one of the most mechanically unique experiences I've ever had. It really does a lot with this concept of "cheating at cards", putting forward a variety of super unique tricks that both work well on their own AND when chained together to create complex but satisfying con jobs with which to fool opponents.  It's incredibly fun.  Furthermore, the game is very narratively compelling.  While at first it seems like a simple game of conning your opponents unravels into a mystery.  There's a CONSPIRACY!!!  It's not perfect by any means, a lot of tricks are one-offs and it feels like at times the game could benefit from less fluff for a more focused player experience, sometimes it can be information overload.  And some mechanics are very much just QTEs which feels kind of lame when so many others require the player to be craftier.  But on the whole, like, this almost made the 5 star list, I loved this game, I thought it was going to knock Gravity Rush 2 off my current top 3 for the year before I sat on it for a little while.  9.5/10

Diary - Spoilers Ahead!!!:

7/13/25

This game is already hurting my brain.  There are so many tricks I have to remember exactly how they work, and on top of that the game keeps expanding existing tricks so that I have to remember the specific nuances of the cheating I'm meant to do.  And I'm just REAL BAD at some of them, y'all.  But it's fun, it's so much fun.  Like, even if I panic just a little bit, I've yet to find a trick I'm just totally like "this isn't fun, please don't make me do this".  Even the trick I'm absolutely the worst at, the one where you have to pick up the cards on the table in a certain order to stack the deck, is fun.  I'm absolutely terrible at it, my brain doesn't work in a way where I can do that one fast enough, but it's so cool to pull off and that's all that ultimately matters, isn't it?

In fact, making the player feel cool is such a central theme to Card Shark, I love it.  Every trick makes you feel like you're really outsmarting the opponents at the table.  Like you start out not really doing anything cool, glancing over your opponents' shoulders to see what card they have and then signaling to your guy at the table what their best suit is.  But quickly the game introduces sleight of hand, having you learn a proper card trick, allowing you to rig what the top cards in the deck are during your shuffle, and once this is added into your arsenal, then you're cooking with gas.  In my opinion not only are these the tricks that make you feel the coolest, allowing you to manipulate the deck during the shuffle without anyone becoming overly suspicious, they're also the fastest and most fun to pull off.  I think the game even knows it because it feels like these tricks are the ones where you gain suspicion meter fastest.

Speaking of the suspicion meter, this game is incredibly well balanced so far.  Like, you can tell a lot of testing went into this.  So the way cheating at cards works in this game is that you have a "suspicion meter", representing how suspicious your opponents are of you in the midst of the game.  The longer you take to do tricks, the more suspicious they become of you, and it feels like the more their suspicion goes up, the faster it then goes up from there.  And it seems like the harder the trick, the slower the suspicion meter fills.  So with the sleight of hand tricks, because they tend to be the easiest to grasp, the opponents become suspicious faster, while a more complicated trick will make the opponents' meter go up way slower, it's a very well balanced game even if it doesn't make sense sometimes.  Like the trick I'm the worst at, the one where everyone's cards are on the table and you have to pick them up in a certain order to stack the deck in your favor, is thankfully one where suspicion goes up slow, but also how does it work in context, the other players are just seeing my sit over the table hesitating to pick up cards as I sort their order.  A really risky strategy you can implement if you can afford to do it, is to intentionally mess up a hand, as that will take suspicion off of you, but you will lose your bet and that can be damaging in the mid to late game as bets really start flying due to the games' double or nothing system.

And you need to keep that money to help the orphans.  Card Shark is set against Enlightenment era France and your main character and his mysterious eccentric mentor are traveling with a Romani caravan which, allegedly, seeks to con with a good cause.  You can certainly keep your money, at least I guess so, I don't know what happens if you don't.  But what the game wants you to do is stop in and donate money every so often to the cause.  Any money you put into the Caravan is seeded around, used to help the poor and disenfranchised within France, namely Romani orphans.  I'm really interested to see how this part of the game develops, if it even does.  It might just be to make you feel good, that's valid too.  But I wonder if gaining the trust of the Romani will aid me later on, you know?  Like there might be a point where my mentor is going to betray me but because I gained the trust of the caravan they save me?

So, like.  Voltaire is just here.  I'm kind of surprised how many Enlightenment-era French historical figures are present in this game.  Like I knew it took place in that era, but I guess I just didn't assume it would also have us encountering real historical figures, you know.  I don't know enough about the players in the Enlightenment to really comment on most of them, but I really wanted to draw attention to Voltaire because I find his characterization so fascinating but also so distinctly him.  Voltaire, along with his Jean-Baptiste (modeled after Jean le Rond d'Alembert), know they're getting swindled.  Absolutely bamboozled.  Totally smeckledorfed.  They just don't really care.  Both of them find our ability to con them so effectively quite amusing if anything and, at certain points, help us to find marks for our crusade against the nobility just to see our process in work.  I think it feels very true to both men, both highly intelligent and curious and maybe a little arrogant so as to feel like they are part of the game we're playing, forgetting we are still hoodwinking them.  Unrelated but kind of related to French historical figures, it took me until this game to realize that a "musketeer" implies "a musket" and that despite basically modern media depicting the musketeers as fighting primarily through fencing, they would be gun toting soldiers.  Felt so dumb.

There's a conspiracy!  A mystery to uncover!  So excited for a mystery.  So, at the end of the first chapter, the game is separated into chapters, chapter-based games with mysteries have never gone poorly for me, we discover that King Louis XV, along with a prominent politician, a former noble who is now on the run in foreign lands, and the now elderly, slightly senile former leader of the musketeers, are possibly involved somehow in the death of Sophie d'Aubigny, one of the few characters besides the protagonist in all of this who isn't a real historical figure.  We know not why the King is seemingly involved in Sophie's death, or what motivation the party would have for this presumed murder.  And yes, if you know the name "d'Aubigny", Sophie is related to exactly who you think she is.  I genuinely just thought this game would be about cheating at cards and then eventually you beat enough people, the fact that this game has a conspiracy in it?  Tres magnifique!

7/16/25

I found out what happens when you die!  I don't actually know how often death is on the table for this game, it feels like it's specific encounters but for all I know it could just be the result of letting any suspicion meter fill all the way.  When you die in this game, you awaken in a sort of purgatory, an alternate plane of existence where your fate must be decided.  The only thing seemingly in this purgatory is a large banquet table, your protagonist taking a seat on one end of the table and, at the other end?  Death herself, an beautifully dressed headless skeleton whose head sits on a platter in front of her.  She asks you for your time of death (this uses the system clock) and then you make her a offer: play a game of cards for your life back.  I have to imagine that these encounters will get harder the more times they occur, but in this particular instance we managed to successfully rules lawyer Death into letting us live on another day, arguing that we did not say that if we won the game we would revive, just that if we played it at all.

It me.  Am big baby false shuffle.

On that note: game hard now.  Like, game was always hard, I'm not quick, so suspicion meters fill QUICKLY, but like.  It's getting to a "do I lower the difficulty" degree as the tricks become increasingly complicated and longer to pull off.  There's one trick that happened in this section where you spend like ten minutes setting up the trick by painting errors on cards that hopefully your opponents won't notice but you'll be able to subtly note as you're dealing cards.  Speaking of which, dealing is a thing now, and it's something you have to do at a consistent pace because stopping to try and sort out what the cards do is a major tipoff.  The complexity makes all of the tricks super rewarding though.  There was a point in this section where the game was like "you've been doing this for a while, see what technique you think you need to use to do this con" and I got it so quickly, I felt like a pro.  I do think we passed the first "unfun" trick however, the mirror trick where you have to pass out cards so your opponent's cards are reflected in a mirror and you can take note of their highest value card.  It's a clever mechanic, I just feel like it's one of the easier ones to gain suspicion on for me as I cannot take the info in as I quickly go over the mirror and usually have to pass it back over.

There's a dueling minigame!  I was wondering if we'd ever have proper combat in this game.  It makes me curious if this is an option moving forward, if I lose out on a con, instead of it being an arrest/execution, I can duel my way out, would be interesting.  Dueling is a fun but simple Simon Says minigame, you have to watch your opponent and then replicate their moves, clashing and parrying until your opponent does a move that leaves them open, allowing you to strike.  So far it's been a simple 3-4-5 structure, with the final move on the 5 set being the moment to strike, but I imagine it'll switch up the more dueling I do.  I also would not be surprised if we learn how to "fight dirty" later on in the game, taking advantage of "noble opponents" to gain advantages.  There are very few tricks we've learned so far that haven't been expanded upon in a later point of the game.  And also Julie d'Aubigny is here and she didn't teach us how to duel despite fencing being her whole thing, so you know, we have that to look forward to.

This game is high drama, y'all.  So, it turns out that Sophie d'Aubigny WASN'T murdered but instead died in childbirth.  Because she was secretly pregnant with King Louis XV's child!  The conspiracy, referred to as "The Twelve Bottles of Milk" throughout the plot, was that twenty years ago, Louis XV, along with his three trusted advisors, had hidden away his secret wife during the pregnancy at a pub named the Twelve Bottles of Milk.  They arrive the night the baby was born to discover her having died and a mysterious stranger, S.W. Erdnase being present holding the king's newborn.  Erdnase, btw, is a pseudonym for the author of the book "The Expert at the Card Table", a book about card tricks and sleight at hand.  In real life, Erdnase's identity has long been a mystery, with some speculation being that the tome may be much older than its publishing date in 1902.  It's all coming back around, y'all.  Erdnase whisks the child away, putting them into the care of the pub owner, a woman by the name of Ms. Porterhouse, who flees into the countryside to begin a new life.  And that baby is the protagonist.

Yes, as it would happen, our silent, or rather, mute protagonist is the missing Prince!  Or at least that's what everyone suspects, I'm doubtful the conspiracy is over so quickly.  The only information Erdnase actually passed to the king was that the child was "born without a tongue", indicating muteness.  In the introduction to the game, Ms. Porterhouse was murdered by a high ranking official in the French court, a sort of Javert type of cop.  It seemed as if it were simply a crime of passion, this man got swindled at the table and started acting out, fleeing from the scene before attempting to frame her adopted son for murder.  But now it's clear that it was deliberate.  The prominent politician that served as one of Louis XV's co-conspirators, William MacGregor, has been working from behind the scenes to try and end the life of our protagonist, who has now adopted the name "Eugene", in hopes he will never make himself publicly known and claim his status as rightful heir to the throne.  Now that we know the truth, allegedly, our mentor has begun hatching a scheme.  A scheme to set up Eugene on the throne with hi, by his side, the ultimate con.

So, as mentioned, Julie d'Aubigny is now in this game.  This is a pretty substantial change from the actual historical record that really recontextualizes what we're doing here.  In real life, Julie died long before the reign of Louis XV, dying sometime in her early 30s and leaving behind one hell of a legacy.  In this game though, Julie survives into her old age and, in fact, has children.  That is the relation between Sophie and Julie, Sophie is Julie's daughter who disappeared 20 years prior.  This is all important, because it turns out, Julie was ALSO investigating what happened to Sophie.  A process she undertook using Sophie's twin sister Deborah to try and weed out the info from the aging former musketeer captain by posing as his long-lost niece.  The niece that was there when we challenged the captain to cards to also weed out the info, causing him to get upset and take his own life!  The DRAMA y'all.  We are literally first introduced to Julie with her confronting US, believing that we are spies for William MacGregor who were sent here to get in Julie's way.  All the while, we had come around to the Hospice where the musketeer captain had resided to confront Deborah, thinking SHE is a spy sent by MacGregor.  DRAMA.  I'm glad we've met Julie now, I still don't trust our mentor and she may be a powerful ally in the event of a betrayal.

A little note I enjoy about the game's progression is how Eugene's journal evolves throughout the journey.  So, Eugene starts out the game as a random peasant and only has the most base understanding of reading and writing.  One of the overarching subplots in this game, however, is that Eugene's mentor is teaching him how to read and write.  He starts out with spelling and then moves on to improving his grammar.  And so, if you check the journal throughout the journey, Eugene is getting more and more eloquent as time goes on.  He kind of starts out with that "caveman speak", using very simple words and phrasing, just trying to get the point across with his limited knowledge.  But then he starts capitalizing proper.  And then using longer words, adding punctuation, improving his sentence structure.  It's a really interesting way of doing character development for the protagonist.  We also see the protagonist get better at drawing as it goes on, evolving from rough sketches to beautifully done pieces, it's super nice.

7/20/25

I'm at the point where I have to grind for money.  RIP me.  Admittedly, I feel like I wouldn't have had to grind for money nearly as much if I had been playing my tricks better.  In this part, there is one story important mission where you have to go to a gambling hall recently opened by one of your mentor's friends and face off against someone who is also cheating, using a deck of marked cards.  You have to then sneak the deck off the table to mark random low value cards with the same marking.  I didn't pick up on this, I thought I was supposed to remove the face cards since those were marked, so I wasted A LOT of time trying to remove a bunch of faces before realizing what I'm meant to do.  Totally my bad.  This mission ended up taking me three tries but you know what, it's fine, I got there.  And it was a learning experience, I didn't die like I thought I was going to with each failure, I just got arrested and then bail was posted.  I'm curious what missions result in death if you fail them and which ones don't.

Grinding for money is also like, not a problem at all.  I think I've mentioned this previously but after a certain game you play, you unlock a regular game against a trio of high ranking officials who hate each other so much and are also so drunk that they are easy marks.  This game that you keep being allowed to do as many times as you want, also lets you pick your cons per round.  You can also just leave the table at any time so like.  It's very easy to just like bet 500, pick up 1000, leave, and then immediately come back to do the same thing.  At the start of this play session, I was like "oh there's like no risk here" except the game introduces the concept of Highwaymen this time around.  If you carry too much money around on your pockets, your carriage is in danger of being assaulted by highwaymen.  This appears to be one-of, if not the only, function of donating your money to the Romani.  If you carry around too much, you will just simply encounter robbers.  Or the guard of the guy who wants you dead, same difference really.

Interesting trick that happened this time around, we are crossdressing now?  This is a tactic we've seen utilized with our merry band of travelers before, one of the Romani has been posing as a wealthy, disabled female aristocrat for quite some time, doing a good enough job to fool our mentor in fact.  That guy gave us a mirror earlier in the game and now we are utilizing it, posing as a widow mourning her husband and who our mentor has taken under his wing to teach her the rules of cards so she has something to do now.  You utilize this mirror to look at your mark's hand and then signal to... I'm sick of calling him "our mentor" I kept doing it because I figured I wouldn't be talking about him this much because I didn't realize how deep this game goes, his name is Comte de Saint Germain, who kind of is and isn't a real historical figure, he was a mysterious traveler who bumped elbows with tons of important European figures in the 18 century but nobody knows who he actually was.  Anyways you signal to him the most prominent suit and how many cards of that suit your mark has using a fan.  As an aside, it only just occurred to me that the game we play in every trick is different?  Some of them have five card hands, some of them have two card hands, some of them have three card hands.  I don't actually know what's going on.  Anyways the trick is cool and I was surprised crossdressing became a tactic in this game.  We almost get caught immediately our first time using it too because Julie d'Aubigny sits down at our table.

I can feel the divide starting to form between Eugene and the Comte.  In this section of the game, Eugene gets stopped by MacGregor's men and ends up getting arrested, the Comte having abandoned him.  While Eugene manages to get the upper hand on the men, even shooting the sheriff who leads them, he still manages to get arrested for his trouble.  He's then broken out, not by the Comte, but rather the Romani mentioned in the previous part, a man who mysteriously can get into our cell and already has the key to get out.  Our protagonist is, understandably, VERY upset by this, the man he has been trusting to keep him safe and now to help claim his alleged birthright abandons him at the first sign of real trouble and then isn't even involved in the plot to bust him out of there.  When Eugene returns to the camp, he refuses to even acknowledge the Comte, instead choosing to sit himself down in the spot where the Romani mystery man usually sits.  He knows who his real allies are.  The Romani assure the Comte that, in time, Eugene will forgive him.  But we all know how difficult loyalty is to restore once it has been broken, don't we?

7/23/25

Man, the mechanics of the finale are just so good.  Yeah so I beat the game last night, and first off the drama y'all?  Top tier.  But first, something I really love about Card Shark is that by the end of it, it's introducing new tricks to you but then just being like "ok, you're familiar with so many tricks so far so instead of just having a tutorial run using only this trick or this trick in culmination with like a shuffle, we're going to immediately show you the sequence where this trick is at its most useful".  But also it doesn't just throw you into the deep end without practicing first, it will prompt you on if you want to review the other pieces of the trick so you're familiar with them.  Like I just really enjoy how much this game trusts that the player "gets it" without punishing them for needing a little refresher in case it's information overload.  And if kind of is sometimes, you learn a new card trick a level basically so it can be overwhelming.

Speaking of chaining tricks together, there are a few high intensity sequences in this section that I really enjoy.  Like, there's a really good game in Chapter 4 where you have to peek at your opponent's cards reflected in a mirror as you deal them for a couple rounds and signal to your partner what prominent suits they have, but you only do this for a couple rounds because the whole point is to get the opponent, a prominent card player and infamous cheater in his own right, to take notice of your playing because you're attempting to intimidate him.  And then you go in for the kill, using a technique that your party invented and kept pocketed for such an occasion, allowing you a subtle but potent way to effectively mark the whole deck.  Donning our female disguise yet again, a disguise which has gotten us into a lot of trouble this section, actually, due to someone trying to flirt with us and ruining our game earlier, we begin marking cards with makeup.  Then, using our skills with sleight of hand, we fix the deal so all those marked cards got distributed out to where our team wins.  Super good.  I kind of wish that more of these techniques got screentime, a lot of them are only for the game of introduction and cannot logistically appear elsewhere.  It's one complaint I have with Card Shark, actually, there's no real free play mode to utilize these skills in.

The "final boss" though, THAT's a game, oh man.  The game loads you up with tricks that really test your understanding of the game's mechanics.  You have to really get in the weeds and be intimately familiar with how to swipe cards without raising suspicion, how to shuffle, how cards are dealt, when to change up strategies.  All the while being commanded to give certain cards to certain people at the table.  The goal of the "final boss" isn't actually to pull off a major con but rather to start causing drama around the table, using the cards to draw attention to or away from different people seated around.  Your end goal is to make the true villain of this game reveal themselves, let the pressure be put on them so much that they get angry and throw a fit, allowing the entire world to see who they are and what they did.  And then it all ends off with the protagonist doing one final con, one not for money, or even for himself, but one last hand of cards to determine who among the remaining players wins the greatest game of all.  Such a great finale, I loved the final part of this game.

So, I was right, the Comte did betray us.  I actually do like how they depicted the Comte's betrayal in this game, I think it really is more than just "oh he was just greedy all along" and I kind of wish I didn't have to break before I could get the whole sequence.  There's a lot more nuance to it than I was honestly expecting.  Basically what ends up happening is that the Comte really starts to see his end coming.  As the game progresses his arrogance, his need for one final big score consumes him.  We start taking on targets with higher and higher minimum bets, seemingly for no other reason than the Comte getting ahead of himself with regards to his future standing.  And these start going badly.  The Comte gets swindled himself and only barely catches the con, having to rob the con artist directly to save face.  He gets cocky and thinks that a former victim won't recognize him, causing him to end up in a fist fight and leaving him battered and humiliated.  When MacGregor finally corners him and offers him a large sum of money to walk away, he takes it immediately, feeling like his time in the game is up and he should cash out.  He didn't believe MacGregor would actually hurt Eugene and he does regret selling him out to some degree.  He truly does care about Eugene and, in one of the endings, there are multiple, he allows himself to be the victim of the guillotine in his stead.

Speaking of MacGregor hurting Eugene, the conspiracy!  The drama!  I love it.  So, MacGregor finally corners our protagonist and, after the Comte sells him out, challenges Eugene to a duel.  MacGregor pulls an underhanded trick, and impales Eugene on his blade, after which he tells Eugene the full story of the Twelve Bottles of Milk.  See, MacGregor had known S.W. Erdnase was involved the entire time, because he had hired him in the first place.  Erdnase, disguised as a midwife, was there to help birth the child and then give Sophie and the child safe passage into the night after the King had been given a chance to meet his first born.  However, obviously, that didn't happen.  Sophie died, and Erdnase took the child into the night, never to be seen again.  MacGregor, however, adds important context to this action, as he discovers that the tea cup that Erdnase had given to Sophie to help her sleep while she birthed the child, had actually been laced with poison.  Erdnase had murdered Sophie d"Aubigny and ran off with the King's firstborn son, MacGregor following close behind.  As you sit there, dying, you realize that while MacGregor is A villain, he is a loyal servant to the crown, and this entire time you've been hunting the wrong person.

And then we once again meet with Lady Death.  Our second meeting with her goes much worse than the first, luckily, we were only mostly dead and were pulled back to the land of the living by our grandmother, Julie d'Aubigny.  Julie recounts a few of her exploits to us as we heal, including the famous story of her swashbuckling rescue of her lover from a convent she was sent to, and then we get back to work with a new objective.  We must find the Comte and make him answer for his betrayal, of course, that much is obvious.  But more importantly, we must find the true villain of this tale.  We must find the mysterious S.W. Erdnase and bring him to justice.  Luckily, one event leads to the other.  As you best the Comte and follow him over days, he leads you to the King of Thieves, the enigmatic leader of the Romani in France.  Cornering him, the King of Thieves begs you to spare his life, revealing that he has been hiding in plain sight as your Romani friend, Ireneo, the man who broke you out of jail.  He is also, as previous established, the aristocratic woman who has aided you on your journey and who the Comte is smitten with.  And, of course, he is S.W. Erdnase himself.

Erdnase, understanding that he's in hot water, immediately jumps into his version of events.  According to him, while MacGregor's events are mostly accurate, MacGregor left out a very important detail: it was he, not Erdnase, who poisoned the tea.  Erdnase had been given what he believed to be sleeping medicine.  He discovered that he had poisoned Sophie when everyone else did.  Everyone else, of course, except for MacGregor.  Erdnase does, however, reveal his final deception, something that not even MacGregor knows, something that he set up to eventually undo MacGregor, fill him with paranoia until he inevitably crumbles: Eugene is not the King's son.  Sophie's child was stillborn, that was the real reason why he would not cry.  Eugene is simply what he always thought he was, a mute orphan, and also a game piece in a game being played between two powerful men.  This is presumably why Ms. Porterhouse hated him, she had to raise this guy who wasn't even the prince for Erdnase's game.  I would not, of course, blame you if you did not trust Erdnase's events, I don't think he expects you to either.

Which brings us to the final game.  As previously mentioned, the purpose of the final game is not to win, it's to have the villain, MacGregor, reveal himself but fixing the game so that mistrust is sewn between the King and MacGregor.  It works flawlessly, mind, MacGregor is so furious by the combination of your cheating, you getting away with it, and the conversation constantly being led to place suspicion on him that he gives up the entire game, his fiery Scottish temper shining through.  But it also makes one thing clear: even if Erdnase is telling the truth, he is far too manipulative to be trusted.  And so that brings us back to the final hand.  You have all the aces, you've pocketed all of them.  It's just up to how you deal them.  However you do so will decide the future of Eugene and his little party of thieves and con men.  Do you place all your fates into the hands of the King?  Trust the Comte, despite his betrayal?  Try to take down Erdnase by framing him for cheating?  Or none of the above, do you forge your own path?

In the ending I received, the King reveals Eugene's hand, showing it has 5 aces in it, as I dealt myself the four pocketed aces.  The King has him set for execution but the Comte steps in, not wanting his protege that he does, truly, care about to die.  And the Comte dies.  Erdnase disappears into the night, but Eugene speculates he has adopted yet another identity and likely has taken over MacGregor's role.  And as for Eugene?  He retires to the countryside, taking his mentor's advice to reopen the pub he was raised in and live a quiet life.  Many years later, in the midst of the revolution, two people sit at the bar and order drinks from Eugene.  They know who he is, they know about his exploits, and most importantly they tell them that the money he donated throughout his journey was a major contribution to the revolution.  And as Eugene tends to both their drinks, he watches the two men both pull off tricks against each other, tricks Eugene knows well.

Card Shark is one of the coolest games I've ever played in my life.  I have my problems with it, don't get me wrong, I wish that more of the tricks were important and I honestly just wish there was more game to play.  I would love some sort of free play or puzzle mode to experiment with the various mechanics of the game, some of which you only really get to use once.  But it's so mechanically unique, it's story is so gripping and interesting, it's just.  Masterful.  I loved this game, I feel bad for Rise of the Tomb Raider that just like IMMEDIATELY it gets knocked down a peg.  Too many good games, y'all.  9.5/10