All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is a bold, genre-bending adventure that attempts to fuse high-stakes poker gameplay with a dystopian narrative of deception and survival. Developed by ACQUIRE Corp. and WSS Playground, the game lands with an intriguing premise: take the psychological tension of Texas Hold’em and embed it within a world ruled by power-hungry “witches” who use lies and manipulation to control the city. It’s a risky blend, and much like the poker hands it revolves around, the game doesn’t always play a winning hand, but the gamble itself is fascinating.

A unique combination

The story centers around Asuha, a confident and slightly cocky protagonist who believes she has what it takes to take on the witches through wit, poker prowess, and an array of special abilities. The plot unfolds through visual novel-style segments, interspersed with one-on-one poker duels that are key to progressing through the game. The city’s rulers are not just champions of deceit, but literal cheats — and exposing their methods becomes just as important as winning the hands themselves.

The poker mechanics are surprisingly robust. While the game is traditional Texas Hold’em at its core, it’s enhanced by character-specific abilities and tactical tools that let you bend the rules slightly in your favour. These skills can be used to manipulate outcomes — peeking at cards, boosting odds, or shaking your opponent’s confidence — creating moments that feel more like a turn-based battle than a card game. However, these same mechanics sometimes make the matches feel less grounded, especially when the AI frequently folds, deflating the tension of what should be high-stakes encounters. I also found the game very easily exploitable with predictable AI. I experimented with how far I could take it and proceeded to win so many games at the first “table” that I could acquire some powerful skills. I ended up reloading an older save as this trivialised all of the early game.

Jack of all trades, master of none

The game’s structure alternates between matches and segments of city exploration. You can gather intel, converse with characters, and unravel subplots that help build context for the world. Unfortunately, this is where the game struggles. The exploration sections are undercooked, often serving as little more than connective tissue between matches. The environments lack depth, and the flashy dialogue rarely achieves emotional resonance. Characters often feel one-dimensional, with motivations that are either too obvious or too muddled to leave a lasting impression.

Tonally, All in Abyss is a mixed bag. On one hand, it leans into a campy, over-the-top aesthetic with stylish character designs and dramatic, sometimes absurd cutscenes. On the other hand, it tries to tell a serious story about corruption, betrayal, and survival in a crumbling society. The result is jarring. Execution scenes and moral confrontations are meant to hit hard, but the lack of a consistent narrative tone undermines their impact. It’s clear the game wants to be emotionally powerful, but it often settles for spectacle over substance.

Despite these shortcomings, the game does have its hooks. There’s a unique satisfaction in calling out a witch’s bluff, using your skills to reverse a losing hand, or discovering a hidden strategy buried beneath layers of deception. It rewards players who pay attention and punishes those who rely purely on luck. The music and visual presentation, too, add to the atmosphere — synth-heavy tracks and bold character art sell the high-tension stakes even when the gameplay doesn’t fully follow through.

My conclusion

Ultimately, All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is a game that thrives on its concept more than its execution. It’s ambitious, stylish, and refreshingly different — but it can’t always live up to the narrative weight or mechanical depth it seems to promise. For those who enjoy poker and are looking for a fresh narrative twist on it, this could be a compelling, if uneven, experience. But players seeking emotional depth or a tightly designed tactical game may find its bluffs easier to read than intended.

Unfortunately, the highest praise I can give Pilot Sports, developed and published by Z-Software, is that it works. The age-old gameplay loops of flying various aircraft through hoops, landing on platforms, and collecting marked items are just as meandering and trivial as ever here, amounting to a serviceable title unwilling to aspire towards any greater ambition through level design, mechanics, or presentation. By never uprooting itself from shallow aspirations and a hollow identity, Pilot Sports‘ most notable achievement is proving the philosophy that mimicry is flattery, shining a spotlight not on itself but on the title’s much superior, refined source of replication, Pilotwings.

Fool’s Gold

Across fifty stages unlocked by tediously earning gold medals, Pilot Sports tasks the player with maneuvering planes, jetpacks, hang-gliders, and parachuting free-fallers through a handful of monotonous objectives. Though the number of levels might seem generous, their designs fail to gain altitude, never ascending to enticing or surprising heights as you progress. By lacking any attractive mystery in what might await a hard-working, improving pilot, there is little motivation to move forward. Working towards the reward of dull levels isn’t helped by how the game neglects to deliver the information necessary to reach these later offerings. Without supplying the target scores needed to earn each medal within a level, watching my performance consistently fall short of gold on an ambiguous meter often frustrated me with nothing more than a vague sense of the results I was supposed to strive for. Paired with undetailed instructions and omitting a scoreboard, the expectation of retrying these stages quickly seemed more like a chore than an engaging challenge.

Learning to Fly and Fall

Frequently, Pilot Sports contains fuel where it matters most, however. The array of aircraft on offer generally gave me a comfortable, direct sense of airborne finesse. Handling an airplane consistently came with a rush through a generous, arcade-style feel that wasn’t afraid to expect aviators to overcome the reality of the heavy machine’s slow turns. Jetpacking, my personal favorite, was punchy, weighty, and incredibly input-specific, forcing each drip of fuel consumed to find justification due to a depleting tank. In contrast, the foreign design of free-falling levels delivered an uncomplicated but welcome change of pace, usually making up the easiest gold medals.

Typically, my moments of frustration didn’t blame how these devices operate. However, there was an outlier to this rule. Reaching a hang-glider stage never failed to fill me with irritation, causing the goal of achieving gold to slip entirely out of reach. Though the nature of this aerial transportation rests in floaty, wind-surfing navigation, I could never rein in the obtuse, unfair sense of control reflected in gameplay to sustain a reasonable sense of direction or speed. Though the game allows the player to skip levels, reaching the number of gold medals needed to advance means that these unfair hang-gliding stages replace what could otherwise be opportunities for achievement.

It’s No Paradise

Despite its flaws, Pilot Sports had the potential to truly soar above the sparse state of contemporary competition if it were to capitalize on presentation. Instead, it’s aggravating to witness that this is where the title crashes and burns most obviously. Sorely lacking a sense of personality, the scenery of the boring island, defined most notably by its blocky geometry and a barren state of attractions, provides little more than an uninspired backdrop that will go unrecognized by those focused on the equally unappealing presentation of floating hoops and platforms. Even within levels that direct the players into intimacy with the setting, no part of the spectacle proved worth seeing. While there may be reason for this, as the gameplay oftentimes demands focus on what is immediate, such a notion shouldn’t extinguish opportunities to establish a more fulfilling sense of paradise within the player’s blue sky escapades.  

In the character select screen of Pilot Sports, you pick from the character archetypes of goth, punk, businessman, and more. You listen to what I can only assume was once an audio file titled something as elementary as island_music. After picking from this out-of-place lineup, the menu treats you to an eternally rotating shot of the island, a sight that never exhibits a distinct or defining aspect worth articulating. With these few button presses, Pilot Sports gives you a series of impressions that encapsulate the title’s apathy before you even find yourself airborne. Praising the game’s competency is difficult under the weight of its indifference towards anything but mimicry. It’s a title that more immediately identifies as a dime a dozen, uninspired app store experience more than anything else, one amongst many that are starting to populate platforms such as the Playstation Store, Steam, and the eShop. The dusty corners of these catalogs once fostered games capable of delivering on players’ faith that they might discover an overlooked gem. An overpopulation of undercooked experiences and titles drained of spirit has made a history of such hope, an especially harsh realization given how the niche audience for a series like Pilotwings genuinely yearns for a modern counterpart crafted with care. Pilot Sports is, unfortunately, not that game.