Time to go ALL IN, because I know the faker is YOU!
One of my bigger frustrations as of the past few years was how my limited free time has impaired my ability to check out smaller promising-looking titles, and cover them via a review. But after a bad period of crunch time at work and trying out the demo for this game, I figured I should try to get out a semi-timely review for once. It’s time to bet it all and go EMBRACE THE ABYSS!
All in Abyss: Judge The Fake Review
Platforms: PC(Reviewed), PS5, Switch
Developer: Acquire Corp & WSS Playground
Publisher: Alliance Arts
Part 1: Narrative Abyss – Judge The Heart
All in Abyss: Judge The Fake is a poker adventure game staring Asuha Senahara, the self-described prettiest gambler alive, who ventures into the capitalist hellscape of the Designated Gambling District to gamble to her heart’s content. But before she can so much as see the sights, she runs afoul of Witch Capital Works (WCW). An organization of ‘witches’ with seemingly magical gambling powers who control this city from the highest level. With her life on the line, Asuha makes it a goal to take down these witches, prove herself to be the greatest gambler the world has ever known, and enjoy all the fame and fortune that comes with it.
This gives away to a story with a fair amount of intrigue as Asuha learns more about the scale and ambitions of WCW and scraping together every advantage she can. All of which is broken up into four chapters with their own different adventure game and mystery flavor, and a finale chapter that is more of a final boss encounter where the stakes are sent to their logical high. Or illogical high if you’re a stickler about that sort of thing. As a story, it’s nothing too uncommon, with many of its conspiracies being familiar fair for those with decent Japanese adventure game experience, and only a few noteworthy revelations to its mysteries. But it is still a thoroughly engaging affair, propped up by many things.
The story is committed to its status as a darker cyberpunk-lite story. One with outrageous technology, rampant economic disparity, characters who have lost everything and been pushed to the point of desperation, drug use, and straight up murder. None of which feel shoehorned or arbitrary in their implementation. In general, it feels like a title where nobody told the creators no, allowing them to indulge in their interests and fascinations, resulting in a work that feels earnest, if a bit unrefined in its broader themes or execution.
Despite this firmly independent approach to its story, it still sports a quality translation with funny and biting lines. Rock solid characterization all around that instills even bit characters with some personality to latch onto. The scattering of psychotic witches who all offer their own brand of endearing crazy, allowing them to function as effective and memorable antagonists. Ones with enough panache that you almost don’t want to see them get punished for their transgressions. But the foundation that holds all of this together is none other than Asuha herself.
She’s bold, eager, outspoken, hotheaded, and brimming with a (mostly) deserved confidence. However, despite her positively demonic aura when it comes time to place a bet, she’s far from a cruel or unreasonable person. She regularly approaches people with kindness and forgiveness, and is hurt by the sacrifices that must be made in her rise to the top. She’s someone who enjoys living lavishly, yet who holds those close to her dearly. It is a balance that allows her to function as an effective anchor of the game and serve every role the story throws her way. …At least barring a few questionable writing choices, such as having her simultaneously claim she doesn’t lose, while also beginning the second chapter by blowing all her fortunes at the horse track.
Despite a few shortcomings, there’s more than enough here for an entertaining story, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing it play out through its bombastic finale. As for its gameplay… it has more quirks than I would have expected.
Part 2: An Adventure Game WITH Poker
Something that warrants clarification with a title like All in Abyss is its choice in genre, and what the game is ultimately trying to achieve. It is ultimately not a Texas Hold ‘em poker game first and foremost. It is a traditional Japanese adventure game, where pivotal moments are portrayed via poker matches, and where you can freely indulge in optional poker battles to your heart’s content. I would describe this balance as being analogous to the action, timing, and more rhythmic sections of a Danganronpa game. A core part of its identity, but not really what you play the game for. This also means that the game is not Balatro with waifus, because… well, first off, Balatro isn’t a poker game. Seriously, do children not learn how to play poker in school these days?
On that note, the rules of Texas Hold ’em, like with most traditional card games, are pretty simple. The players, in this case only two, are dealt two cards from a deck and five ‘community cards’ are gradually dealt to the table. Broken up into four rounds, the players have the option of checking or calling to progress to the next round. To bet or raise to increase the amount of chips they are betting. Or to fold to forfeit their chips and avoid further losses. At the end of a hand, the remaining players reveal their two cards and determine who has the best hand in accordance to the universal poker hand values. The winner then gets all the money and can cash out if they feel like it.
…Except All in Abyss is a bit different. Rather than try to snag the opponent’s chips, chips function analogously to health or life points. At the end of each hand, the two players have a showdown, the winner is determined, and a chunk of the loser’s life chips are taken away based on the winning hand and bet ‘multipliers’ in place. It takes a few minutes to learn and get used to, but it is a fairly simple system, and one that relies on a fair bit of intuition and luck in order to succeed, just like real poker. Ultimately, you’re hoping that you get a better hand than your opponent. If you think you’re going to lose, folding is a valid option, but remember that your opponent may back down as well, and that until the next showdown happens, the multiplier on the bets is only going up.
There is some simulated psychology to play into here, but by being a one-on-one poker game, things are inevitably going to be pretty simple. The tension of gambling can make even dice rolls enthralling, but there is not too much to this concept on its face. Well, before getting into the RPG lite skill system. You see, Asuha is a gosh darn freak with the ability to change reality itself, and an intuition that borders on clairvoyance.
She can sense when her opponent has a pocket pair, has a matching suit, is close to a straight, and compare her hand to theirs. She can force them to fold and surrender this hand, or prevent them from folding. She can predict what cards are being dealt in a hand. She can defy the odds of probability in her favor by the power of statistical manipulation. Oh, and she can also pull an Ace in the Hole to select what the final card in a hand will be. (Assuming that the opponent doesn’t already have it in their hand.)
With all of these powers, and multipliers to specific hand ranks, Asuha effectively becomes The Goddess of Gambling, able to cheat the odds in her favor in a way that can make her almost undefeatable. Which is where the game designers run into a multi-faceted problem. How do you maintain challenge when having a character who cheats at a game of chance? Well, there are two main ways they work around this. The first is that when battling against a witch, they will use their witch powers to create a demonic Pentagram-themed aura that cancels out Asuha’s abilities until she finds a way to counter their gimmick. And the second is by complicating the skill use and acquisition process.
Skills have to be bought with Skill Points, have equip costs, and can only be used based on how many Luck Points Asuha has. Skill Points are earned by playing poker, with bonus payouts if you maintain a win streak and avoid folding. Equip costs start at a rigid eight and additional cost slots can be purchased from the Peddler or acquired via Poker Royale, a side-mode that warrants its own discussion. And Luck Points are a battle-only resource that Asuha regains at one or every turn, two if she wins a showdown against her opponent. They can be expanded by consuming skill cost slots, or be expanded by going to a lavish nightclub. In a nightclub, Asuha is given a Luck Point boost her next next match and paltry amount of SP that scale with how much she spends on food, women, and alcohol.
This all sounds fine enough, but the devil’s in the details, and the whole economy around this system is… suboptimal. SP is primarily earned via optional gambling encounters that raise in stakes each chapter, but it becomes surprisingly difficult to farm SP starting in chapter 3. There is just not any good place to get the thousands of SP a player needs to unlock the advanced version of certain skills. This problem reaches a comical point in chapter 5, the endgame, where the most a player can get is 800 SP per match, when skills can cost up to 30,000 SP. …At that point, you’re basically asking players to bust out a value editor like Cheat Engine or CrySearch.
Skill slots are limited, which encourages players to stick with a set up that works for them. I personally was fond of the Ace in the Hole, Make ’em Chase (skill that prevents folding), and Sharp Eye (passive skill where Asuha comments on her opponent’s cards). However, this makes up 10 skill costs, and the most you can get for a good chunk of the game is 12, before the game give the opportunity to get another 8 in the final 25% of the game. Rather than encourage restraint, this limitation discourages experimentation, and strikes me as a rather haphazard attempt at balancing, but I think I know why the game is like this.
Back in the demo of the game I played in October 2024, there was no SP, there were no skill costs, and the nightclub mechanic simply did not exist. Asuha had access to all her skills once they were purchased at a shop, for money, and the game also had consumable battle-only recovery items that could be purchased, also for money. This represents a far different vision for these mechanics, and one that I think would have made for a better game. However, in December 2024, the developers announced updates to the demo to reflect these new mechanics, and, presumably made changes to the main build around the same time. …I think this was a mistake.
Firstly, Asuha’s characters is that she is supposed to be a powerful and imposing figure— a “genius gambler”— and one with supernatural abilities that grow over time. So, in my mind, it makes sense for her to be overpowered from the jump, and for the primary limitation of her power to be the luck points. Secondly, the developers have pretty much admitted their fault by, nine days after launch, patching the game to adjust most of the active skills’ skill costs. That is not something you do if you are confident in the balance of your game. Thirdly, there is something very inelegant about the multiple currency system that I feels goes against the spirit of this game’s themes.
In the world of gambling, there are not multiple currencies. There is only one currency that matters, and that’s cash! Chips, pachinko balls, gold, cocaine, it don’t matter, because it’s all a derivative of money! Everything— especially people— can be bought for money, and any gambler knows that with enough money they can get whatever they want. That’s how capitalism works, bitch! The accumulation and glorification of cash, or rather credits, is something that is baked deeply into this game’s essence and general aesthetic, so having these abstract Skill Points comes across as a bolted on bandage.
Oh, and on the subject of money, the game has a strange tendency to take away your money between chapters before forcing you to grind for it again. This first happens in chapter 3, a chapter all about making money from nothing via what should probably have been mini-games, but are instead routine dialogue options interspersed with over a dozen mandatory poker game. I actually enjoyed this approach, especially with the introduction of a chapter exclusive double or nothing poker match that could be repeated infinitely. So I decided to max out the game’s currency system, just to see what would happen. …And what happened is that my funds were wiped to zero at the start of chapter 4, requiring me to rebuild my wealth, again.
This would not be a huge problem if the poker gameplay was fun, and it can be riveting despite its simplicity. However, after a point, it becomes a very routine process once a dominant strategy is discovered. Namely forcing the opponent not to fold, determining what the final card is with Ace in the Hole, and then going all in. This give Asuha a very good chance of winning, and is the best strategy I determined for money grinding. It does not work for the main boss battles against the witches, but it works for chuds with Youngblood’s Disease.
…The kicker to all this is that, at this point, the game kind of lacks anything to do with money beyond a few upgrades at the end, despite enabling the player to gamble their way into billionaire-dom. Instead, the only endgame point of conquest is… Poker Royale.
Poker Royale is an endurance run where Asuha must go through several poker matches without recovering her life chips or luck points. A one-time quicksave is available, but if they fail before completing a set number of matches, they get nothing. It’s not a bad idea, and requires the player to behave more conservatively for a fully optional challenge. …But what irks me is that the developers decided to make this endurance challenge last 5, 10, 25, 50, and 99 rounds across its five difficulties.
This is frankly absurd for a game that relies so heavily on chance. Admittedly, the 99 round variant only gives useless money and an achievement, while every lower difficulty gives another skill slot. However, the arbitrarily chosen numbers for these challenges really illustrates a lack of consideration placed on the more gamey aspects of this title. I have to wonder what sad QA tester was stuck trying to achieve this goal without safe file manipulation, because that probably would take 5 hours in a game that could probably be cleared in 10 if one was focused enough. (Though, it took me 20 due to save shenanigans.)
Edit 4/24/2025: Literally the day after I published this review, the game got a patch that changed the number of rounds for Poker Royale across the board, down from a peak of 99 rounds to 15 rounds. I love being a version 1.0 beta tester and getting an objectively worse experience than people who waited! This isn’t even something you need to test. A 99 round poker tournament was a prima facia bad idea!
Part 3: Pretty Poker Player Presentation
Before getting into the presentation end of things, I think I should pause and clarify that All in Abyss is very much an indie endeavor, despite coming from a studio as accomplished as Acquire. The core dev team was only about two dozen people (two directors, one writer, seven programmers, three designers, two producers, nine artists if my count is right). This is a small-scale project, and the area where this is most apparent is in its presentation. Not necessarily because of what it does, but because of what it lacks.
The game’s main characters have detailed illustrations, expressions, and outfits that wave and bounce around through the power of Live2D Spine, and they do a great job of instilling additional life into these characters. Though, they are limited by a single post and outfit. Something that is a minor factor for most characters, but can get a bit silly with Asuha and the jacket she keeps slung over her elbows, even in the prison and desert chapters. While the faceless minor characters are simply another iteration in a tried and true way adventure game presentation shortcut.
The poker battles are given a graceful amount of effort in their presentations, and I could gush about their busy yet coherent UI design for quite a while. The fighting game-esque life bars for both opponents with the multiplier in place of the timer. The handy hand rank guide off to the side. The stylish four options for think, skills, items, and menu. The deliberate positioning of cards across the screen, providing key information in an immediately readable manner while preserving the secrecy of Asuha’s hand. And the way the player cranks their bets up and down with the right stick or scroll wheel, adequately imitating the tactility of a lever.
The deliberately crafted backgrounds that serve as the key visuals for each chapter are impressively detailed and given life with a scattering of subtle visual effects. The UI in general is a good balance between something stylish and useable, featuring a nice blend of fonts that are readable in proportion to their complexity. (UI fonts can be more funky compared to dialogue and system text.) However, the UX bears some inefficiencies due to a change in scope and desire to stick with something that made sense at one point, but not in the current form. Specifically, the arbitrary delimitation and other elements of the game’s sporadically used inventory system and the save management system.
All in Abyss is a game that encourages routine saving, save rotations, and creating chapter-based saves so that the player can go back and secure missables they might have lost access to, as the game lacks any backtracking. However, the game only gives the player ten save slots, sorts them by number, rather than recency, always defaults to the first save slot, and lumps the save/load menus into one hybrid solution. This makes it very easy to accidentally overwrite saves when one means to load them, adding needless friction to what should be a seamless activity. It’s 2025, make your save and load menus accessible via different commands, and don’t limit them like this when each save slot costs a mere… 4 kilobytes. Is 99 save slots excessive? Yes. Would anybody complain about that being too few? Nope!
Auditorily, I quite enjoyed the sound effects, with the card flipping, jingling of coins, and even the prattling of the cursor through the menus all quickly resonating with me. Unfortunately, the soundtrack suffers from some common budget game OST issue. Where what’s there is generally good, can teeter on generic, key repeating tracks are generally shorter than they ought to be, and the game relies on some tracks far too much. Especially its home theme, which sounds like a modified SLOS backing beat from 2004. The first 30 seconds are pretty much just a 5 second long loop, and as the main theme of the game, you hear the first 30 seconds a lot.
The game also sports some rather delightful barks for characters during poker matches, though that’s where the voice acting begins and ends. Which is a shame considering how punchy the script is and how large the characters’ personalities are. It’s a sensible omission, as I doubt the game’s budget was even close to a million dollars, but it nonetheless prevents the game from reaching highs that they otherwise could. Particularly during key or important moments, but most especially during the game’s many punishment sequences.
These scenes are clearly inspired by the executions of Danganronpa, but rather than be animated and stylized showpieces of ultraviolence, they are… basically a CGs that a camera slowly pans over while text floats on top of them. Every execution has the same ill-fitting metal-esque backing beat, and rather than be brutal in their depictions of death, they’re all really horny about it, or really silly about it.
This fetishistic approach to executions is something that I personally like, as I just think it’s a funny and creative way to go about depicting these scenes. Some may find these indulgences to be contentious, but I view this as a creator doing exactly what they want and, as a pervert who thrives in the land of kink, I frankly love to see it. However, the scenes themselves are home to some bizarre artifacting, indicating they forgot to export the illustration at the right resolution, or run it through an image upscaler. Though… image quality appears to have not been a concern for some members of the dev team…
Part 4: Throw GenAI into the Abyss
That’s right, All in Abyss uses generative AI! I was hiding this factoid until now, because I wanted to assess the game without acknowledging the five footed elephant in the room, but now’s time for the moralistic and artistic lashing! All in Abyss is the first game I have played that makes use of AI generated images, though it uses it in a rather narrow context. Only the backgrounds for most dialogue scenes.
As far as I can tell, all characters, all CGs, all depictions of the city, and all other visual elements were crafted by hand. However, the backgrounds of bedrooms, dark alleys, busy storefronts, arenas, casinos, and more are all the product of generative AI. The game tries to obscure this fact by hiding these images behind an halftone dot filter, but the more one looks at any given background, the easier it is to spot the AI artifacts and stank.
This, most likely, was a cost-cutting measure and a way to avoid paying a background artist to depict these environments. A move that denied an artist, or artists, a job, income, and the ability to buff up their portfolio, and there is no good justification for this. It looks bad, it is morally bad, it is an unfortunate stain on this game, and it is a tone-deaf decision for a game that is inarguably pro-human and anti-AI in its theming and plot. If someone chooses to not engage with this game because of its AI usage, that is completely understandable and justified.
What really gets me about this AI usage is how thoughtless, lazy, and preventable this all is. While it can be tricky to find them, there are background artists who make high quality artwork that can be licensed for a surprisingly cheap fee. I personally enjoy plugging the work of minikle on DLSite, who sells background sets for $20 or less a pop. Or, you could just license photos and throw some filters on them to obscure their origins.
These approaches have been used by many small-scale visual novels I have encountered, like Angels with Scaly Wings, Crimson Gray, re:Dreamer, and Army of Tentacles, but this approach also was used by the likes of Higurashi and Umineko. It is a cheap and ethical way to provide backgrounds to your VN or ADV, and through the use of basic image-editing filters, most players would not even notice them. Sure, there are some unique backgrounds where it may be harder to find exact matches, but I would say that just a vague gradient would be better than using AI in a for-profit premium product like this. When I buy a game, I expect to see art, not AI generated trash.
Conclusion: I Judge Thee A 7/10
If I play a game, it’s typically because I want to love it, and I really want to love All in Abyss. I loved what I played from the demo last year, and was excited to see how the full game would turn out. And, ultimately, I think it’s just pretty good. I love Asuha as a character, the story has some great tension and surprises in it, and there is an undeniable sense of passion strewn throughout its every facet. The gameplay has some marvelous highs that truly make you feel like the bad bitch of poker as you manipulate the threads of fate to deliver a unanimous victory to yourself. This is clearly the result of a small team with a lot of ambitions and something to prove to themselves and others. However, in its rush to keep things balanced, the developers wound up creating several problems in their attempt to solve one.
Though the game uses its resources well for the most part, but the gaps in the presentation really stand out in certain regards. And by having the audacity to use generative AI for backgrounds, I cannot in good consciousness give the game an asterisk-free recommendation. I can admire and appreciate it for what it is, but also really wish that it would have the opportunity to become a better version of itself. Alas, with such little attention and a dangerous yellow rating on Steam, I cannot see that happening.
