Card Shark looks like it should be an artsy and relaxed kind of game. That is only in appearance. In reality the game will not pull punches and will punish you for mistakes. The game also maintains a degree of mystery and unpredictability as to how much it is ready to punish you if you fail too much. This is an amazing and unique game about cheating at cards. The gameplay requires doing awkward moves with your controller, remembering cards, associating cards and so on. All of this must be done within very tight timing. Unless you're a god gamer, expect to fail regularly. Some tricks are a lot harder than others and aren't necessarily the last ones in the game either. This game is short and memorable, practically a must have.
n/a
This game is amazing however you have to be mindful of a number of bugs which can affect gameplay and quests in pretty significant ways.
I wanted to love this and I got it on Steam for the VR experience. The VR mode is well-implemented but there are a couple of non-invasive visual glitches. Puzzle games in general aren't a great fit for VR because of the inherent fatigue of wearing the helmet while thinking, but it is very nice to feel like you're there (or at least, more immersed). I tried it then played on a normal screen. I remember not making it very far in the original version as a kid. I assumed the game was long and had many different worlds. I was wrong, it is quite short. There are only about a dozen puzzles really, and the vast majority of them are about observing the world more than logical thinking. For the two last puzzles I knew exactly what to do and where to go to gather the information I needed. In general across all puzzles the time I took to think about a solution was about ten times shorter than the time it took me to execute it. In other words, for modern standards this game really does not respect your time. At all. A feature to teleport to arbtrariy locations you've been before (and haven't been barred from) would have made the game _a lot_ better. But at the same time, that would also have made it significantly shorter. This is so bad that I started timing things out in order to optimize my navigation around the island (figuring out when going through the Starry Expanse is shorter than the maglevs, for example). Some less important points: * The attention to detail to recreate the same environments is bordering on maniacal at times. This is obviously a work of passion. * Unfortunately the animated characters look very, very bad for modern standards and quite jarring compared to the static geometry. It looks like they've used AI to generate 3D models from the original 2D videos (that can't be true but that's how it looks like). Some characters have hats that shake above their heads for some reason.
I really hope to see more in the future. I paid 9€ for this game which has enough content for a single play session. There's just one case to solve. Which makes this very expensive. I would recommend this game to fans of The Case of The Golden Idol or The Obra Dinn and if money isn't too tight.
This arguably has DRM. It's not a bad map, it just has DRM, so it shouldn't be sold here.
The art style is adorable, but that doesn't compensate for the weaknesses. The core gameplay is a very shallow hack & slash which additionally suffers from performance and precision issues. Not much changes from the beginning to the end of the game, except your chances of getting a weapon you don't want. It's pleasant for a while, nothing more. The settlement part is, I'm sorry to say, an irredeemable, pointless bore. After 10 missions you'll dread going back to do your chores. It's incredibly repetitive. There's no management: no tough decisions. It's just buttons you have to press to get stuff. If you remember facebook web games back in 2014, that's a good summary of what the settlement part of the game is. Considering Hades, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, and another dozen similar games have virtually infinite replayability, this game just isn't worth playing.
