It’s a funny thing in my life that, when I was a kid, I read individual stories from The Thousand And One Nights in various collections, but didn’t get around to the full text itself until much later. The story of Scheherazade was one that I didn’t get exposed to for a while, which I can sort of understand given that her story was tied up with all the other stories she told. The adventures of Sinbad, the cleverness of Aladdin, the dumb luck of Ali Baba, they can stand on their own but Scheherazade’s story doesn’t quite do the same. You hear a story about a woman who told stories every night to avoid getting executed in the morning, you’re more curious about the stories she told to keep from losing her head than the fact she spun things out for three years. In that same vein, Sultan’s Game gives players an interesting premise, but suffers from a bit of ludonarrative co-dependency.
Sultan’s Game puts you in the court of an anonymous Sultan as a nobleman who has been appointed to perform terrible things for the Sultan’s amusement. A strange magician has introduced the Sultan to a game where cards are drawn at random and tasks of four general categories must be performed. The Sultan played the game himself and has pretty much eliminated all of his original court. Now, he’s twisted the game around, picking lower tier nobles to serve as his proxy and giving them a week to complete the task they’ve drawn or be executed for it. Of course, there’s a thousand other ways to die before the Sultan gets his chance, but there’s also the possibility of escaping the game, or even deposing the Sultan himself. And if you die, well, there’s always more noblemen where you came from.
Visually, Sultan’s Game borrows heavily from Middle Eastern mosaic patterns combined with a stylized set of character portraits to create the ambience of an ancient court in the throes of madness and evil magic. The user interface is clean and simple, though card management gets a little out of hand if you’re in the middle of a really good run. Beyond this, visuals are pretty minimal. Good animations for dice rolls which determine your degree of success in challenges, as well as pretty simple but effective animations for when you “break” a Sultan Card. Some subtle lighting effects for certain actions. This is one game where the visuals are nice but genuinely secondary to the gameplay.
The audio elements of Sultan’s Game are almost unable to be mentioned because, much like the visuals, they’re secondary to the gameplay. There is a soundtrack of Middle Eastern sounding music, heavy on the oud and bouzouki, little lighter on the winds like duduks, but it’s not especially memorable. Sounds effects are equally minimal and equally forgettable. This is one time where good voice acting would have been really helpful to read the text as it comes up. In my head, Shohreh Aghdashloo (Mass Effect, The Expanse) would be just perfect. A couple non-committal grunts and sighs are simply not enough.
Anybody who has played any sort of roguelike such as Hades in the last few years will be able to get the basic premise behind Sultan’s Game without much trouble. It’s considerably less frenetic, with a turn-based mechanic instead of ARPG-style hack-and-slash. But it’s still not easy. Each “turn” you draw a Sultan Card with four possible tasks: Carnality (sexual events), Extravagance (big spending), Conquest (organized military events), or Bloodshed (straight-up murder). Each card (as well as the other cards in your hand) come in one of four rarities: Stone (grayish-brown), Bronze (greenish), Silver (bluish), and Gold. From that point, you’ve got seven rounds (expressed as days) to break the card. You’re unable to play a Sultan Card in an event against a target of lower quality. So, if you have a Bronze Carnality card, you can’t visit the bordello and resolve the card against a courtesan of Stone rarity. You could, however, play it against a Silver rarity courtesan, if they’re currently in the rotation. But you can only play that type of card once per event, so if you used a Carnality card with your wife, you can’t use another Carnality card with her again. You can swap out a Sultan Card a limited number of times if you don’t think you’ve got the right circumstances or setup to complete it, but you won’t reset the countdown and you might just make things worse. Harder difficulty levels shorten the amount of time you have and reduce the amount of swaps you can make.
With each round, a number of activities are available. It’s impossible at the start to do all of them, so you’ve got to figure out the best balance of actions that will potentially help move you forward and resolve the current Sultan Card as well as strengthening your position for possible endgame scenarios. Like any roguelike, however, it’s entirely dependent on getting a good run going and sometimes, that’s just not doable. If you can get the ball rolling, and keep it rolling, you’ll earn “Fate Points” for hitting certain achievements the first time around. Enough Fate Points earned will let you buy new cards or upgrades to existing cards which will help improve future runs. Limited time activities can appear (and sometimes reappear) which will give you chances to add new cards to your hand or possibly resolve a Sultan Card. But sometimes, random events will occur at the most inconvenient times and shank your ability to complete a Sultan Card. Early and often may be the best way to go, if at all possible. And it isn’t always possible.
As I mentioned before, there’s a ludonarrative codependency going on in Sultan’s Game. There are definitely story elements tied up with actions; doing good deeds while using a Sultan Card sometimes turn out badly. Expedience and the threat of a Sultan Card not being fulfilled sometimes leads to narratively unsatisfying solutions. If you get a good run going, there’s interesting story arcs going on and possible options which might keep the run going further. But all of that presupposes that you’ll get a good run. Whereas in Hades you could talk to different NPCs and maybe shape your next escape attempt, everything resets aside from whatever Fate Points you’ve spent to improve your hand. It feels more like a time loop rather than the next man in line to get his life ruined. The stories kind of blur together like previously seen options in a visual novel. If names of characters you came across and could recruit had been randomized between runs, it might have helped break up the sense of monotony. As it is, between the randomness of the Sultan Cards and the slow grind of Fate Points to try and literally stack the deck in your favor, it creates a sense of numbness. The execution of Sultan Cards lose some of their impact if you’re deadened because of the grind. Worse, it seems that the RNG is unusually slanted towards higher level cards at the start which you cannot easily clear. I’m trying to recall the last time I started a new run with a Stone or Bronze tier card. It felt almost perpetually stuck on the Silver-rank Carnality and Bloodshed cards to start off. Such a situation doesn’t do much to improve the sense of story or enjoyment. Combined with a sense that some events are not random but actually follow a specific timeline no matter what you draw, and the enjoyment goes down even further.
Ultimately, Sultan’s Game is a good effort, but perhaps not the best possible effort. The basic premise isn’t bad, but the way it’s executed tends to spoil a lot of the fun unless you accidentally stumble into a good run. While I can appreciate that somebody wanted to give a more mature take on a classic “folk tale” premise, sex and violence (even only by description) can’t elevate a game by themselves. It needs a great storyteller to make it work out, and Scheherazade is conspicuously absent.
Axel reviewed Sultan’s Game on PC with a provided review copy.
