Before Telltale hit the jackpot with The Walking Dead, it had Poker Night At The Inventory. Ostensibly a poker game, it was instead more of a stage for its various crossover characters to perform; seeing the Heavy from TF2 bounce off Max from Sam & Max, Strong Bad, and Tycho from the Penny Arcade webcomic was awesome. I’ve always been surprised that, other than a single sequel a few years later, Poker Night At The Inventory didn’t cast a larger shadow.
Enter Sunshine Shuffle, a game which takes the same basic concept as Poker Night – character building by way of poker – and instead uses it to tell a darker, more involved story. While it falls into the exact same pitfalls as Poker Night, it’s a development of the concept I’ve been waiting over a decade to see.
Sunshine Shuffle puts you in the shoes of a detective, brought to a sun-soaked ship to play poker with a gang of former criminals, who just happen to also be cute animals. Over a series of casual poker tournaments, it’s your job to listen to the story of their crime days and decide their fate – do they get to walk free, or should you turn them in to the Fishie Mob.
At first glance, it’d be easy to write this off as yet another ‘wholesome’ or ‘cosy’ game that lacks any kind of substance and instead coasts off of cutesy visuals. Instead, that sickly sweet veneer is used to contrast with the darker themes at play, and each character has multiple dimensions. You see them wrestle their inner demons as their story unfolds – such as Peter, the meek and timid cockatiel with anger problems, or Jordan, the capybara who uses his boisterous personality to make up for a history of trauma and neglect.
It nails the feel of a casual chat with friends over a game of poker, complete with lighter, more comedic moments that use a well-timed pun or non-sequitur to steer the ship back from the gritty brink. Unfortunately, that conversational ebb and flow hampers the pacing as the topics get heavier. The cast may clam up and retreat into a repeating loop of poker-themed callouts, rather than the juicy crime story that was unfolding just a few minutes ago. I don’t need to hear about how Peter rarely raises a dozen times.
For all Sunshine Shuffle’s interesting tone and likeable characters, it feels like it loses interest in its own story, quickly wrapping it up with a less-than-satisfying twist and hand-waving away the one choice it’s spent the whole game preparing you up to make. It then makes the hilarious suggestion that you keep playing poker after the credits roll; the characters go from well-written and layered, to simply serving as gargoyles you play fake poker with forevermore, with no hope of further development or new dialogue.
This is where it makes the same stumble as Poker Night At The Inventory: poker against AI is boring. You lose that social element of reading your opponents and trying to bluff your way into a win, and after a couple of hands, it begins to feel old. Poker should be the pretense for something more, not the main attraction. Both games live and die on their characters, and when they stop delivering the goods, all you’re left with is a generic poker game that outstays its welcome.
Sunshine Shuffle feels thin, yet overextended at the same time. Had it doubled down on its greatest asset – its characters – it could have been something great. As it is, the story is over far too soon, and all that’s left is a middling card game you could play with less faff pretty much anywhere else. It’s great to see Poker Night At The Inventory live on, but Sunshine Shuffle forgot that the poker was always the least important part of it.
3/5
A code was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.