Alexx Aplin
Alexx AplinEditor’s Note: The following review contains discussion of adult topics and sensitive subjects. Reader discretion is advised.
Sometimes, when trying to choose games to review, I dip outside of my comfort zone. Other times, I think I’m looking at a game that would be totally up my alley, and instead I end up finding something else. In the case of All in Abyss: Judge the Fake, I thought I was getting a Texas Hold’ Em version of Balatro, but that is not what this game offers.
The premise of All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is that you play Asuha Senahara, a young woman who believes she is one of the best gamblers in the world. She comes to a city known for its gambling and quickly finds herself beaten. However, she also discovers that there is more to this city and its gamblers than meets the eye.
Behind the Five Witches of the Pentagram, the mysterious gamblers who rule the city, there seem to be fraudulent acts and cheating. Can you help Asuha defeat them? Well…whether you can help her is not exactly the question. The question is whether you’ll want to once you play through the game’s opening act.
All in Abyss plays like a mix of Texas Hold’ Em, a Visual Novel, and (very loosely) an RPG. Asuha can unlock various abilities over time that allow her to do things such as predicting what cards will be played, influencing what cards will be played, and strengthening her “damage” to the opponent’s chips.
The issue is, when you get to each chapter’s boss area, where such a thing might really matter… most of the time, none of this is relevant. This is because after you are introduced to each Chapter’s boss, you spend most of the chapter trying to figure out how they are cheating, and how to counter it.
That would be a cool concept, except most of this is fed to you through linear Visual Novel gameplay that is dripping with the worst innuendo I’ve ever seen. I have played some raunchy RPGs, and I rather enjoy a few of them, but All in Abyss’ adult themes aren’t even interesting. They are just re-treads of jokes that would have been made by teenagers in the 90s or 4chan fetishists.
All in Abyss also tries to set itself apart in the vein of Death End Re;Quest by making unique “punishments” for losing to bosses. The bosses also get punished when you are successful in defeating them, but to save you some time, I’ll just tell you, these aren’t punishments, these are fetish torture scenes.
I would hope that you aren’t giving a game like All in Abyss to a child or teenager, but just in case you need a reminder: This is not a game for children. I actually wrote about an adult visual novel earlier this week, but All in Abyss isn’t even tasteful or erotic, it’s…disturbing. I’m not going to bash anyone for the wild and weird things they get up to, but this game in particular takes erotic themes and goes several steps too far into snuff territory.
I can’t even say that the artwork is good, because while the characters themselves are drawn well, All in Abyss’ own Steam page mentions that AI was used for the environments and backgrounds. I didn’t realize this before I requested the game to review and started working on it, but here is what the Steam page says about it.
“Background images in this game partially contain AI-generated content that is post-processed by hand and given final touches to best suit the game’s thematics. “The City” does not conform to this, and is created from the ground up by the fine hands of the creators and artists.”
Considering most of the game takes place in The City, I’m not sure what they mean by the fact that the City wasn’t done by AI. Regardless of this, the character artwork is good, but nothing extraordinary. It also doesn’t help matters that all the voice dialogue is in Japanese, with only text localization in English.
Poker gameplay makes up such a small part of the overall experience that it feels almost like false advertising. Not only that, but when you do get into poker hands, most of the time you spend several rounds with your opponent randomly betting and then folding. Also, one of Asuha’s abilities is wrong 90% of the time, and it is supposed to be the main one that is her signature talent.
With all that in mind, if you look at All in Abyss: Judge the Fake and think “Oh, this could be a good Poker game” or “Oh, this might be Poker meets Danganronpa,” I assure you that you are wrong on both counts. I really wanted to like this game, but it is just awful. Save your money and just buy Balatro, or find an actual Texas Hold’ Em game somewhere that you can play with friends or CPU opponents.
A PC Review Copy of All in Abyss: Judge the Fake was provided by Alliance Arts for the purposes of this review.
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All in Abyss: Judge the Fake
15.99
Pros
- Decent Character Art
Cons
- AI Background Art
- Vulgar Torture Endings
- Sleazy dialogue
- Boring Gameplay
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