Sunshine Shuffle

I find reviewing short/cheap games very difficult. When there's a large cost or time commitment it's a lot easier to weigh it vs the quality of the product. Sunshine Shuffle works. That's probably the best thing I can say about it. It's not really trying to be a full fledge poker simulator and it's not really trying to be a deep narrative journey either. If it fully committed to both I think this might've been a great proposition. A sort of Poker Night at the Inventory with a deeper narrative structure. Unfortunately, instead of doing either story or poker fully it does a half measure of both. The result is the story often feels jumbled, the initial hook is pretty lackluster, and it's often not clear when scripted narrative conversations are happening. The tone does a lot of jumping back and forth between being a silly and campy story of bank robbing animals and gritty murder retellings told with the grief and tone of a dramatic novel. The result is passive story retention with a slap in the face every once and a while of something seemingly inappropriate. Despite the pretty bad presentation I think if there was a much stronger emphasis on the story it would have felt more impactful. Maybe if there were mechanics that directly tied to getting more of the story, be that consumable papers/notes or locking parts behind specific events, I may have been more interested in what they had to say. The story itself could have stayed unremarkable if the poker simulation was passable. Unfortunately, there is approximately 0 quality of life features here. Don't get me wrong, the poker mechanics are there and everything works correctly, but everything is completely manual, and there is no additional features to make the process smoother. By the time I was done I was really aching to get off. It's cute and it works, but I have no plans on booting it up again.