Danganronpa-style aesthetics and humour combined with Texas Hold ‘Em poker? Why yes, I did jump into All in Abyss: Judge the Fake without a second thought. Short of adding in strip poker mechanics (oh the nostalgia for the days when PC gaming was inundated with those), this, right here, is exactly the kind of poker game I want to play.
However, the first thing you’ll notice as you play is not actually the poker. All in Abyss uses poker as a kind of “battling” mechanic in a narrative that is best described as a blend of RPG and adventure game. What that means is that the focus is firmly on the protagonist, Asuha, and her allies and enemies, and that gets the game off to an excellent start. One and all, these characters are excellent. Written to have sharp attitudes, they offer even sharper humour, and the writers do an amazing job through them of instantly creating a compelling world.
At the start, you’ll be immediately thrown into a high-stakes game between Asuha and one of the “witches” who basically runs the show in town. Asuha’s always been lucky and had a love for gambling, but she doesn’t understand anything about poker. The witches all cheat, somehow, and have been undefeated as a result of that. Asuha loses that first match handily, but then immediately challenges the witch to a rematch in a week. The catch this time is that the loser will be “punished…” and yes, it’s a Danganronpa-style punishment. In fact, these “punishments” often had a fetishistic quality in addition to the inherent violence and were enough for me to raise an eyebrow… there probably should have been a content warning on this going in. Some people might find them a bit shocking.
That aside, after losing that first practice match, Asuha sets off to learn how to play poker, while at the same time learning how her opponent cheats and her weaknesses to get an edge in the life-or-death duel ahead. The writers really took advantage of the inherently surrealistic plot to write with creative abandon. Asuha’s acid tongue makes her a standout protagonist, but the villains are all endearingly savage and secondary characters provide the right context for all this humour to bounce off. There aren’t many deeper themes at play. Early on, when describing the setting, there’s a note about the living standards of the 99% as the 1% make obscene amounts of money playing poker, but the potential for this to become a kind of Triangle of Sadness-style scathing satire fades into the background pretty quickly. For this reason, All in Abyss isn’t quite the masterpiece Dangonronpa is (with the latter actually exploring deeper themes). As a character play, though, it’s impossible not to love the game, and while I wasn’t expecting a poker game to be one of the most well-written things I’ve played in the last decade, All in Abyss surprised me in the best possible way.
The poker mechanics, meanwhile, have been tuned around fast play brilliantly. Rather than collecting money from winning hands (which can result in real poker matches dragging out for a very long time), in All in Abyss, your chips are your “hit points”. When you lose a hand, you lose the chips from the total. Once you hit zero, it’s game over.
Meanwhile, every time you bet or raise, a multiplier increases, meaning that whoever loses that hand is going to lose the cost of the chips, times whatever the multiplier is. Thanks to this, a typical “battle” only lasts for a few hands before the multiplier results in a single big hand destroying the opponent (although, naturally, the boss battles do roll on much longer thanks to the starting chip counts).
As the world’s best poker players would tell you, it’s not down to luck, and All in Abyss throws in some additional mechanics to help give you an edge. There’s a skills system in play where you can give Asuha a “loadout” to take into each poker match. Skills range from being able to perceive the kinds of cards that her opponent might have, to being able to choose the final card that is drawn to the table. Or alternatively, she could use a skill that prevents her opponent from folding (perfect for those times you know you’ve got a killer hand and want to go all in). It’s unfortunate that for most of the opponents, the same skill loadouts are sufficient, given how many skills you can earn. I would have dearly loved for the game to throw you at a wide range of different opponents with their own skills that required you to constantly change up the loadouts. Unfortunately, that only really applies to the big boss battles. Nonetheless, it is an excellent system and, much like how Balatro played with basic poker to turn it into a more skill-based experience, All in Abyss reworks things masterfully.
About the only time All in Abyss loses steam is when you need to start playing a lot of matches with randoms to earn money or grind up skill points. That’s not where the game’s strength lies. As long as it’s moving forward, whether that be through the story, as you wander around the city following the trail of breadcrumbs, or in battle with those high-stakes games to the death, All in Abyss is a rocking great time. Supported by exceptional visual aesthetics and an incredible soundtrack, it’s very hard to put down. If only it didn’t have those moments when it let itself become repetitive and made the card game seem mundane. I don’t know if it was an effort to pad out what would have otherwise been a fairly short runtime, but for something that trades so heavily on ongoing creative energy, letting there be a “grind” was a mistake by the developers.
That said, All in Abyss is exceptional. Sharp and very funny writing, is backed by a fast-paced, intelligent appropriation of poker. This is going to be one of my highlights of 2025.
I played a demo of this earlier this week and it seemed very interesting. Definitely checking this out after the 173 other visual novels I want to read.