Sultan’s Game is a shadowy, fascinating and unabashedly horny oddity

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I anticipate that I probably won’t fully get to grips with the Sultan’s Game strategy for the next few hours, but since I’m considering investing that time – after a morning spent shuffling cards and deciding who to beat and who to murder in my game, Steam demo – I must emphasize this. It’s deeply flawed and deliberately obtuse, but also absolutely fascinating. I’ll lock you in with a slightly shaky and uninteresting reference to Cultist Simulator, and then guide you through it in roughly the order in which I experienced it. As you progress, you may feel more and more confused. It’ll be like a tour of a brewery that I somehow inherited control of by murdering the previous owners. Forward!

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The art itself is gorgeous, falling somewhere between the multi-colored, horny horniness of Hades and Yoshitaka Amano 1001 nightsand the soundtrack also works great as scenery. For the tutorial – which, I must add, is really only a tutorial for about 30% of the game – you take control of the Sultan. He is bored with all earthly pleasures, until one day a magician comes to the door with a box of cards. The cards come in four varieties: carnality, bloodshed, conquest and extravagance. Each of them also has a value such as “gold” or “silver”. To fulfill a card, you must find a target of the same value to apply it to. There is also the option of trying to cheat the tutorial mage, which I chose With just curiosity. It doesn’t work anyway.

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I concluded that the Sultan was a real moron around the time he broke the neck of the spouse with whom he had solved his initial “carnality” card. The next one I got was a gold “bloodshed” card, which meant I had to personally murder a gold-level character in my court. As you quickly realize, your courtiers are resources. There’s an effective, Frostpunk-like tyranny to it all. Many resource management games utilize some sort of population system as part of the release, but both the graphics and focus on text mean that you at least have some understanding of these characters as people before you “spend” them on whatever disgusting purpose requires it card.

Fortunately, after the tutorial you no longer play as the Sultan, although he is constantly present. On the embroidered map, you create a character with a tiny entourage and an estate that you will utilize to visit various places and events, and then you draw your first card. You have seven days to solve this problem before the Sultan executes you. Once this card has been resolved, you will be given a up-to-date seven-day grace period for: Beheading.


Image source: 2P games

This is where things get a little tricky, but overall it’s a narrative worker placement game. Your main goal is to trigger any event that will allow you to utilize your card, and in doing so you will progress through little story chains. To get the premature bloodshed card, I had to convince a guy to like me by giving him a book I bought with the cash I earned for having my wife look after my estate. But she also had a high “wisdom” factor, so I wondered if it wouldn’t be better if she was sent to the Sultan’s palace to keep an eye on the politics there. Not only are you trying to resolve cards, but you also have separate modules tracking your reputation and influence in the city. Bonus cards like tricks or, say, pricey perfumes to utilize while spying on bathhouses can give you some nice buffs, which usually come in the form of re-rolls to other events.

As you can easily guess – that’s a lot. So much so that I can’t even fully quantify this randomness due to the lack of a proper reference point for how much volatility expands and how this theoretical batch contains and contextualizes all the diversity within it. Still, despite only understanding about 90% of the prose due to various translation errors, I think there’s enough here for a dubious recommendation, provided you’re not put off by the too close proximity to where murders and boning are usually found. It’s very shadowy, but at the same time full of ideas. At least at this early stage, there’s a very exhilarating sense of not knowing how deep Sultan’s Game goes, which is one of the best things in video games, imo.

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