Apologies for the late issue but I have been busy with Street Fighter 6 content, including a properly last minute visit to Capcom on Friday evening to play the damn thing. You can read those over on GamesRadar, a cool site for people who want the best possible write-ups of the recent Street Fighter 6 content. Hopefully (!) normal service will resume next Friday!

Ace.

For a long time, I've been a fan of Ricky Jay, the sadly departed master of sleight of hand card magic. His charm, wit and the fact he was either a clear scholar - full of knowledge about countless subjects - or simply able to blag his way through any situation as if he was an expert, makes his act absolutely magnetic. There's loads of footage on YouTube but I highly recommend this BBC 2 documentary - Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters and Ricky Jay.

The guy was a master con-man. Even in that sequence where he appears to get extremely heated with that one guy, he was fully in control of the situation, using a technique to fluster the mark and ensure that he can get him to do what he needs to do to separate him from his money. It's about more than just the card tricks, it is about the journey Ricky Jay takes you on journey. He was equal parts a warm, inviting entertainer and a total mystery. As the ultimate con-man, he could be whatever he needed to be to get the job done.

I've always found that this would be a brilliant thing to frame a game around. Not just the gambling and the deceit but the craft and showmanship that makes up the whole package but - as someone with absolutely no idea how to even begin making a game - I had no idea how to pull all the component parts into one satisfying whole.

Enter: Card Shark.

A really good game can use simple controller interactions to connect you to what you are seeing onscreen in a really strong and meaningful way. Card Shark uses little flicks and holds of the analog stick to really make it feel like you're committing these brilliant acts of card-based fraudulence. It's remarkably well thought out that, even though you're only learning the absolute base level concept for these tricks, you're convinced you're learning some dark arts. Secrets designed to rob the rich and stupid of their ill-gotten golds.

Set against a politically charged backdrop of France just before the French Revolution, the stakes very quickly rise from trying to win a few quid here and there to actual life and death and, due to how involved you feel with the process of performing these tricks and cheats, you really feel the pressure crank up when you're trying to do them against the clock or under serious virtual scrutiny. You have to ensure that you're well rehearsed for your time in the con-artist spotlight and you'll genuinely want to replay the tutorial sections, so satisfying it is to pull a trick off perfectly. When you know that you've managed to sort the cards in a way that secures your win and you flick the stick to mark a card in the deck to lock this in and start your shuffling, its right up there with stuff like pulling out the killer piece of evidence in an Ace Attorney game. Top stuff.

It's not perfect - the 'death' mechanic in the game is, at first, absolutely brilliant but quickly becomes a bit tiresome and there's quite a lot to remember so it isn't a game that lends itself to casual play. You have to, like an expert card manipulator, stay well practiced and knowledgeable of all of the tricks you have at your disposal. There's 28 in total and all of them add a little extra bit of complexity to the scam but you can easily forget them if you leave it a few days between play sessions.

However, when you're holding a deck and are discreetly shuffling your way through it to pull out favourable cards in a situation which could mean you end up dead if you screw up, there's absolutely nothing like it. Part rhythm game, part memory test, part puzzler - it's a really unique game and the way that you handle the cards is executed in a really fun and compelling way. There's a surprising amount of variety in the tricks - I asked a good friend of mine to find out if the developers had heard of Ricky Jay and they confirmed that a sequence where you have to discreetly fling a card onto the chair of an unexpecting mark is straight from the Ricky Jay playbook. This video, in fact. Finding this out is the icing on the cake of what is a really cool little game.

It looks great, has a really good soundtrack and is really well written, the wonderful trifecta of things you need on top of great mechanics to make for a proper all-timer and while this seems a bit too 'one and done' to be among the truly elite it is so far proving to be an absolutely essential play. Devolver Digital, those sons of bitches, they just DO NOT MISS at the minute.

THANKS FOR READING.

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