Card Shark (PC) Demo Preview

I was going to start this article with some needlessly heartfelt spiel about “believing in the heart of the cards,” but I honestly haven’t watched or played anything related to Yu-Gi-Oh! in so long that I’ve forgotten what that’s all about in the first place. Besides, the game I’ll be previewing today isn’t about believing in your cards. Instead, it’s about honing and subsequently believing in your ability to cheat at cards without getting caught. I’d say that’s much more exciting than simply hoping you draw the Right Leg of the Forbidden One at the perfect time to send your opponent to the Shadow Realm or something.

Anyway, Card Shark comes our way from the duo of developer Nerial and publisher Devolver Digital. I downloaded its demo during February 2022’s Steam Next Fest almost immediately after reading about it in an article from PC Gamer. As a quick side note, if you’re a recurring reader of ours, I suspect the name Nerial might ring a bell for you. Nerial was the development studio behind the 2020 title known as Orwell’s Animal Farm, alongside publisher The Dairymen.

As I’ve expressed before in certain videos, I’m a terrible gambler despite having been born and raised in the city that serves as home to the heart of America’s gambling industry, if not that of the entire world. I can hardly claim to know more than the absolute basics of how to play a simple game of cards, for example. I can see why that could lead you to think I might pick up a trick or two from a game like Card Shark, which focuses both on how the game is played and the apparently numerous ways its rules can be exploited if you have a willing cohort on your payroll.

To its credit, Card Shark provides what I would call a considerable amount of instruction in the various games of cards that were commonly played in the game’s setting, namely 18th-century France. I think I’ve managed to expand my knowledge of the game rather significantly just by paying careful attention throughout the approximately 45 minutes I’ve currently spent with Card Shark’s demo. It’s not often that I get to say I learned as much as I have from playing a video game about helping a con artist enrich himself by cheating at cards.

Of course, I’m sure the primary reason the game provides the helpful tutorials it does is because it certainly helps to be as familiar as possible with how something works before you can, shall we say, “modify the situation” to your advantage. That is to say, I would imagine it’s rather difficult to cheat at cards (successfully or otherwise) if you don’t know how to play in the first place. To that end, the game seems to voluntarily go the extra mile to make sure you know exactly what you’re doing. For what it’s worth, I greatly appreciate its efforts on that front.

I think I’m getting ahead of myself though. Let’s backtrack a bit and discuss some of the game’s plot and setting before we dive into its core gameplay loop. As I said a moment ago, Card Shark takes place in southern France in the year 1743. You play as an unnamed, mute servant boy in the “care” of an abusive patroness. The game explains that the reason your character can’t speak is due to a neurological disorder that causes seizures of some description. Somewhat strangely, that disorder is exactly what sets the stage for most of the game’s events.

Your luck begins to change when a fellow known as Comte de Saint-Germain enters your patroness’ place of work. He requests that you pour him a fresh drink, then strikes up a rather one-sided conversation with you. Even though you can’t speak, it seems this gentleman has a plan to help you both earn some extra cash if you indicate to him that you’re interested in that sort of thing.

His plan is rather straightforward but will require both luck and finesse to pull off. Since you’re ostensibly just a humble servant boy who does whatever his mistress and her patrons ask of him, no one will think twice about allowing you to pour them wine during a game of cards. You and Comte de Saint-Germain will use this inherent indifference to your advantage, as you’ll be expected to peek at your collective opponent’s hand of cards while pouring wine for them and, depending on the circumstances, use at least one agreed-upon means of signaling its contents to him.

I suspect that this gameplay mechanic constitutes at least one reason why Card Shark outright tells you it’s best played with a controller. The haptic feedback you get from pouring wine with a controller’s analog stick is, in my experience, much better than trying to do the same thing with a keyboard. For example, if you’re like me and need as much time as you can possibly get to look at your opponent’s cards, you can intentionally pour their wine slowly when using a controller in order to give yourself those precious extra few seconds.

What I find particularly difficult about this gameplay mechanic is that you need to ensure you get a good look at your interlocutor’s cards while simultaneously taking great care not to under-or overfill their glass of wine. If you screw up the process of pouring their drink, your opponent may well grow wary and begin to suspect that you’re in cahoots with Comte de Saint-Germain. If they figure out that this is the case, let’s just say it probably won’t end well for you. Many people in this era of France’s history carry pistols and tend to use them, especially when intoxicated.

Your poor patroness finds this out the hard way when Comte de Saint Germain’s first opponent deduces your scheme. Things almost go south exponentially quickly for the both of you, but you ultimately wind up able to flee. From then on, you’re a pair of con men on the run, trying to get rich quick and (at the very least) stay away from both a prison sentence and the business end of someone else’s gun.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I think that’s about all I’ll tell you about Card Shark at this point. I find the game’s concepts interesting, even if my performance at most of them is lackluster. Thankfully, if there are any mechanics you think you might need to practice a few times to really get the hang of them, the game will likely give you the chance to practice in a low-stakes tutorial setting. That’s yet another thing I think Card Shark does quite well, in addition to its aforementioned thorough instruction in the art of the game of cards.