Card Shark puts you into the shoes of a mute serving boy in 18^th century France. An ill-fated attempt to help a conman with a grift to earn a bit of cash ends up with your boss dead and you blamed for the crime. Now you're stuck adventuring with a small group of conmen and vagabonds, trying to earn enough money to make your way forward. There's more to this group than meets the eye, and its true goals have the potential to change France entirely … assuming they don't get sent to the gallows first.

The plot of Card Shark is probably the most engaging part of the game. The slow build-up of mystery and characters is genuinely enjoyable, and there's a satisfying sense of power in going from a nobody to fleecing the nobility of its not-so-hard-earned cash. Your character may be mute, but that is an actual part of his character rather than a joke, and your ability to influence his actions and responses makes him feel like a real person rather than a convenient avatar.

At first glance, you may think Card Shark is a standard card game, but the trick is that you aren't playing cards. Instead, the cards are a medium for what you're really doing, which is scamming people. If you're a successful con artist, there's no need to actually play the game. The game is built around a variety of minigames. Each one corresponds to a specific trick, and while there is a lot of overlap between tricks, each one has its own foibles and mechanics.

The coolest part of the experience is that it serves as a simple guide on how old-school card sharking worked. Before each trick, you can get a tutorial on how it functions. With very few exceptions, the tricks are grounded firmly in reality and are based on actual card shark tricks. This makes the game lightly educational in a fun way. I found myself looking forward to each new gimmick if just to see how clever they were.

The minigames sort of make me think of Warioware. They are all straightforward and simple, but your goal is to do them as quickly as possible. Many are simple timed button presses or memory games, but a few get more complex. What makes them stressful is that every moment you spend on a minigame is one moment longer for your opponent (or opponents) to get suspicious of why you're taking so long. Suspicion is carried from round to round, but if you lose a round, it resets some of the enemy's suspicion.

Why is suspicion important? Nobody likes being cheated by a card shark. People will accept losing under suspicious circumstances, but the moment they know you are cheating, out come the pistols and swords. With that comes your almost certain untimely death. Death isn't the end, though. When you die, you're confronted by Death, who is nothing if not a game player. You're offered the chance to cheat Death at cards, and in doing so, you get a second chance at life. Mess up, and the consequences are more severe. At its worst, your save game can be deleted to force a fresh start. There is an easier mode that limits these consequences and has a hardcore mode where you don't get a second chance at all, for those who like some spice in their game.

Each card game has its own gimmicks. Sometimes you're fleecing a rich man for his money. Sometimes you have multiple people at once. Sometimes you're part of the game, and other times, you're disguised as a servant or waiter so you can pour wine (and spy on cards). It can get more extreme, such as an attempted arrest mid-game, two philosophers who want to use your cheating to advance their own theories, or a game played at gunpoint where you need to keep it going long enough to figure out a way to escape. Each one adds some flair , but the gameplay remains largely similar.

Overall, the minigames add to the atmosphere and tone of the game. No minigame commanded my attention, but a few outstayed their welcomes. I likely wouldn't play them outside of the context of the game, but that's not really a criticism, since they were designed to be part of the gameplay. They add some tension to the mix and make the act of cheating genuinely feel like a trick.

The core game design involves you moving from area to area, most of which earn a new trick. Each area has one of the aforementioned gimmicks. In challenging areas, you can increase the bets you make, which increases suspicion more quickly but can earn more profits in the long run. Profits are used to get into higher-stakes games and donate to a community fund for the group of vagabond allies. Your goal is to complete the main story, but there are some options available, including potentially grindable "free games" where you can choose the exact scam you're going to run. It's straightforward, but the plot manages to keep it engaging.

The visual style of Card Shark helps it stand out. Everything has a pleasantly messy hand-drawn feel that fits the tone of the game. It's charming, and screenshots don't quite do it justice compared to how it looks in motion. The soundtrack is also quite good and does a lot of heavy lifting for the atmosphere, assuring that even simple visuals carry the weight they need.

One complaint I had is that there were a few annoying bugs. Most were ignorable, like simple visual glitches, but one I got on a handful of occasions was the game not properly registering that I did something right. For example, a tutorial for a specific mechanic would keep telling me that I was failing until I got frustrated and skipped it. As I did it in the "real world," the exact same things worked fine, and I never had any trouble with it again. I had a similar issue pop up during a death challenge, which led to me having a game over, but it was also a one-time thing that occurred early enough, so it wasn't a big loss. Ideally, this will be patched quickly, but it might be worth keeping a backup save to be safe.

Card Shark is an interesting little game. At its heart, it is more of a card-themed visual novel with some educational elements, but it presents the entire experience in an enjoyable package that avoids overstaying its welcome. A few nagging bugs and glitches caught my attention, and nothing ruined the game, but hopefully at least one issue will be patched soon. Either way, it's a fun experience. Just don't try to take the techniques to Las Vegas ….

Score: 8.0/10