The actions themselves are always simple, but they can sometimes be a little too abstract as a result. When all you’re doing is twiddling the joystick or clicking the mouse in various sequences, it can be difficult to follow along with exactly how the deck is being manipulated. The complexity of some of the harder tricks can be especially confusing, and you can end up following the directions blindly like you’re playing a game of Simon Says without actually understanding what you’re doing. The motion detection in just one or two of the tricks seems off too, like when a side-to-side motion registers as a clockwise circle a few too many times to be a one-off glitch.

The simplicity of these controls also means that once you’ve learned so many of the game’s tricks, actions start to repeat themselves and it all begins to blur together. There is no other gameplay beyond these tricks: you can re-visit some areas to earn more money, but there’s little incentive to do so. Card Shark could have used something else to keep one revisiting taverns and really raking up the dough. The only thing you can do with your hard ‘earned’ cash other than spend it on more gambling, and that to basically donate it to charity, for which you don’t get anything tangible as a reward. It seems like a missed opportunity to deck the protagonist out in fancy clothes or to upgrade the carriage you use to travel from one location to another.

My feelings on the Comté frequently changed, as he was at first revealed to be a cheat, then a sort of Robin Hood, then a father figure to the protagonist, then something else that I won’t spoil for you. My interest in the story certainly outlasted my interest in the gameplay, which had about halfway through begun to feel a little one-note. There are some brilliant moments of subversion where you use your newfound sleight-of-hand skills to make it seem like someone else at the table is the cheat, but these are few and far between. By and large, each scene plays out in a similar manner.

Starting from about halfway through, I made use of the handy difficulty feature that offered to skip the gameplay after failing at the round at least once. Losing even one round at the higher-stakes games can mean losing all of your gold in one go, and revisiting the earlier levels are just not engaging enough to bother with. It was the story that kept me playing until the end, because I just had to see if the voiceless protagonist’s budding life of deceit would end up paying out. It gets quite melodramatic by the end (in the best way possible), through it climaxes with more of a fizzle than a bang.