Not every day, a promise of mediocrity ends up delivering something new like Sultan’s Game. If perspective is reality, the closer you stand, the more you will find yourself lost in the beauty of this masterpiece.
Developed by Double Cross and published by 2P Games, Sultan’s Game is a narrative-driven RPG, Life Sim with card elements, set in a fictional alternate-history Sultan-monarchy.
Sultan’s wrath
The story of Sultan’s Game is anything but simple. However, even the deepest of plots begin simple.
You are a Sultan that was tricked by a witch of choosing and reborn as a peasant working hard to make ends meet. You must face the cards dealt and find a way back on to the throne before your head is taken.
There is a new Sultan in your place and he has you sentenced to death in a few days time.
The witch offers you a token to help change the mind of the sultan. Every time you successfully convince the Sultan of your worth, you are granted more days to live.
Each cycle, the witch provides a new token. But the game only gets denser and harder, with more faces and names to remember, befriend, or estrange.
Sultan’s cards
The face of the game is a large map with many little interactable locations. All your assets, including money, friends and family, are available to you in the form of cards. Each day, you must place the cards on these locations to get the benefits on offer.
For example: You place a worker or a slave to handle business duties, and the next day you shall have 5 more coin cards, send yourself with a gift card in hand to talk with the sultan.
Basically in Sultan’s Game, you drop a person(yourself or other), a required card for the location(this could be money for the shop, animal skin for the tailor, gift for the Sultan, etc,), and, optionily, you can one or more boosting cards(Knowledge, Gossip, Love, Whispers, Fear, Happiness, Courage).
At the end of each day, you get a full summary of all your actions and how they changed the world around you. The number of things you can do and how they affect the world of Sultan’s Game make the experience very engaging.
A Love for Story
It is insane to me how this game came with such a deep and philosophically engaging story.
The choices you make in Sultan’s Game are not based on RNG or tactics; they revolve around morality and sacrifice. It baffles me to think of the amount of time it must have taken spent write and code such detail into the beautiful game.
Each character is written like they are the main characters of their world. I have never seen a static, picture-by-picture, game show so much life.
It could have been a card battler with pretentious dialogue and quest lines, that is the status quo. But it isn’t. There is love behind everything, and it kills me to think that many will not give a chance to this masterpiece solely because it is 2D or does not have mindless shooting.
Games like Sultan’s Game are what make me happy that I get the chance to review indie titles and wade through the continuous trash… All so I can find these gems hidden beneath
This is something, something fresh, and I loved every second I played. And believe me when I say this, I will be playing more Sultan’s Game in the near future.
