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I predict I likely won’t have fully gotten to grips with the strategy of Sultan’s Game for several more hours, but since I’m considering investing that time – after a morning spent card shuffling and deciding whomst to bone and whomst to murder in its Steam demo – I’m compelled to spotlight it. It’s deeply imperfect and willfully obtuse, but also absolutely fascinating. I’ll ground you with a slightly wonky and dull allusion to Cultist Simulator, then guide you through in more or less the order I experienced it. As we progress, you may feel steadily more disorientated. It’ll be like a brewery tour I’ve somehow inherited control of by murder-boning the previous owners. Onward!
The art itself is gorgeous, sitting somewhere between Hades’s multi-hued, drive-by horniness and Yoshitaka Amano’s 1001 Nights, and the soundtrack also does a great job scene setting. For the tutorial – which, I must add, is only really a tutorial for about 30% of the game – you take control of the Sultan. He’s bored of all earthly pleasures, until one day a magician arrives at the door with a box of cards. The cards come in four flavours: carnality, bloodshed, conquest, and extravagance. Each also has a value like ‘gold’ or ‘silver’. To fulfil a card, you need to find a target of equal value to enact it upon. There’s also an option to attempt to bone the tutorial magician, which I picked out of curiosity only. It doesn’t work, anyway.
That the Sultan is a real piece of shit is something I picked up around the time he snapped the neck of the consort with whom he resolved his initial ‘carnality’ card. The next I got was a gold ‘bloodshed’ card, which meant I had to personally murder a gold tier character from my court. As you quickly realise, your courtiers here are resources, There’s an almost Frostpunk-ish efficient tyranny to it all. Many resource management games use some sort of population-as-spendables system, but both the art and the focus in the writing here mean that you do get at least some sense of these characters as people before you ‘spend’ them on whatever sordid goal the card demands.
Somewhat mercifully, you don’t actually play as the Sultan after the tutorial, although he is a constant presence. You make a character with a small entourage and an estate on the embroidered map you’ll use to visit various locations and events, and then you’ll draw your first card. You’ve got seven days to resolve it before the Sultan executes you. Once you’ve resolved that card, you get a fresh seven day grace period re: getting your head cut off.
This is where it gets a little complicated, but very broadly, it’s a narrative worker placement game. Your main goal is to turn up whatever event will let you use your card, and in doing so, you’ll end up progressing through little story chains. For an early bloodshed card, I had to convince a dude to like me by gifting him a book, which I bought with cash I earned for having my wife watch my estate. But she also had a high ‘wisdom’ stat, so I was left wondering if she wouldn’t have been better deployed to the Sultan’s palace to keep an eye on the politicking there. You’re not only trying to resolve cards, but you’ve also got separate trackers for your reputation and influence in the city. Bonus cards like ploys or, say, expensive perfume to use while spying the bathhouse can net you some nice buffs, which usually come in the form of rerolls for other events.
As you can likely tell – it’s a lot. Such a lot that I can’t even fully quantify it’s lot-ness for lack of an adequate reference point for how lot-erly it expands, and how this theoretical lot contains and contextualises all the assorts lot-ness within it. Still, despite only grasping about 90% of the prose due to various translation errors, I think there’s enough here for a tenuous recommendation, providing you’re not too put off by the close proximity in which murder and boning are usually found. It’s very dark, but it also feels very vibrant with ideas. At this early point, at least, there’s a very exciting sense of not knowing quite how deep Sultan’s Game goes, which is one of the Best Videogame Things, imo.