I finished the game in shivers

[PhantomDgen]

This game popping up was a huge surprise, i always enjoyed the advanced techniques of sleight of hand, but never had the hand dexterity. But always loved the concept of controlling a game so subtly, and so smoothly, you get the upper hand with a wide variety of trickery and illusion.

This game just proved to be exactly what i was craving! High Stakes, big risks, and sometimes the real value is on the info if you keep playing, so losing itself is a resource and a mechanic which was implemented so nicely

I enjoyed every second of the demo on the permadeath, which made the end, just so much more tense than i expected, trying to handle the situation and not mess up a single detail while trying to track so much things was just exhilarating to say the least, while also exploring the ideia of actually cheating with sleight of hand into actual games with high gold stakes or even lives, which is just not somenthing you can practice, for reasons... i wonder why.

the only nitpick complaing i would have is that I just felt a bit fuzzy with the controls when trying to be smooth, i wish you could apply the techniques with more expertise when you reach the point you got a good feel for the tech you are applying (and even more if you are on permadeath, since sections should feel like they can be done quick, if you know what you are doing). Example would be the one you hint the strongest card with the towel and by holding the cup, you actually waste quite a chunk by scrolling over the options - same with the one where you choose a suit with your finger on the cards which is quite a bummer when you are trying to scrape and do stuff smoothly. I wish i could stack a deck and shuffle a bit faster since the suspicion increases so fast during shuffles, but i cant do it faster even if i could, i wish the uneffective shuffle tech was easier to select, but at least the slow sus meter makes up for it.

I think most of these selection problems could be easily solved by making each trigger be a choice, or button. LT for gold (or jester) RB for spades (or queen) LB for Hearts (or king) and RT for Clubs (or Ace). or ABXY intead of the Buttons and Triggers

As for everything else, this game just pinpointed it, the art, the animated splash screens on every settlement, the crunchy sound effects of the cards, the general setting that the game is in, the tense minigame-ish mechanics that the game have makes new fresh mechanics come up very often to keep engaging but still has space for expertise its just great. and the feeling of the high stackes and that you cant mess up now its priceless. Will be awaiting this game very eagerly for sure!

[ehjaredj]

Thanks for the kind words! Really glad that you are enjoying it.

We definitely understand the desire to go faster, especially on Con-Artist difficulty.

For something like the speed of deck shuffling, unfortunately changing the speed could break animations. However, we could consider altering the suspicion rate to make it less punishing while you're waiting for animations.

For certain signals, it makes sense to expect to do them quicker. However, solely mapping it to a different input might be a bit too easy. Perhaps we could make the alternate input only available later in the game or in the Con-Artist difficulty, but those kinds of changes would take quite a bit of development time!

We really appreciate the feedback though! We will be taking all the comments we receive for a post-launch patch.

[PhantomDgen]

That's fair enough, though, if we cant play faster to mitigate suspicion, would be awesome if you did with perfect timing/sync with the animation it did reward you for doing as fast as you can, so rhythm and flow would be rewarded instead of purely speed. That could potentially fix the issue that going way too fast break the animations and still would reward pinpoint accuracy and rhythm with the shuffling.

An cool risk/reward skill situation on con-artist would be perfectly pressing the shuffle input when it pushes the clump of cards in, giving a perfect pop up or a little shine, or haptic feedback and making the suspicion meter either stop or freeze for some frames. while doing way too hastly punishes with either nothing happening or making the suspicion meter go a bit faster