All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is a gambling visual novel from developers WSS Playground and Acquire Corp and publisher Alliance Arts. It’s essentially what if the anime Kakegurui was turned into a Danganronpa game. It’s got the quirky characters who each have a unique skill they excel at, the detective work leading up to a big face-off, and even the over-the-top executions of Danganronpa. But it takes the hierarchical system in which everything is decided through gambling (more specifically, Texas hold’em poker) and the adrenaline addicts that will risk anything for another high from Kakegurui to replace the murder game. Or reshaping the murder game, I should say, since characters still end up playing for their lives most of the time.
You play as Asuha Senahara, a self-proclaimed gambling prodigy, who arrives in The City, a place where gambling rules everything. In a rash act of naivety, you challenge one of the five Witches who form the ruling class with their undefeated track record. You stand no chance, but one thing becomes clear: The Witch is cheating. It’s up to you to figure out how her tricks work before the rematch. And if you can’t, then prepare to be publicly executed. The people need to see that you can’t just stand up to the Witches and get away with it.
That’s the basic setup for both the overarching story and every single chapter. They all start with you challenging another Witch, being obliterated by them, and then needing to figure out how they cheat before the rematch. While in the first two chapters, it still involves some actual detective work: going to different locations and talking to people before picking up the right objects that might be helpful to you. The latter chapters have completely given up on that and just need you to collect a certain amount of money to challenge the Witches, while all the necessary info to beat them will come to you in time. The detective parts are never particularly difficult anyway; the game holds your hand pretty tightly. But at least there’s something more to these early chapters than just grinding poker for a couple of hours.
The biggest problem with it is that, as poker is a game of luck, how long it will take you to grind for the money needed is up to chance. You need to win upwards of 10 games in a row, and that becomes incredibly frustrating when skill is only one part of the equation. While you do have access to special skills that allow you to manipulate the cards to some degree, you fundamentally cannot guarantee your win. Especially because a big part of the skill in poker is being able to read your opponent or trick them with a bluff. In other words, the human component. As you’re playing against a computer, it’s simply impossible to play mind tricks on them or read them for that matter. The opponent will fold on you the majority of rounds anyway, which makes winning any match a chore on top of it all. You need to reduce your opponent’s score to zero, but to deal meaningful damage, you need to actually play out a hand, which the constant folding of your opponent prevents.
But the games of Texas hold’em poker are only half of All in Abyss: Judge the Fake. It’s a visual novel after all, which means plenty of dialogue and reading. Unfortunately, the writing won’t blow you away either. The narrative leans into every cliché imaginable and is unable to surprise at any turn. You often know the secret of the Witches from the very beginning of the chapter but have to wait until Asuna and the game catch up to you, which makes the detective work tedious and robs it of any excitement. The characters give you nothing to care about beyond some admittedly pretty solid designs. But worst of all, the dialogue is just painful. Filled with memes and internet slang, it’s modern in the worst way.
The games of poker are occasionally fun, although tiresome the more of them you have to do. But the unreliability of its gambling component makes it mostly frustrating. The characters are cute for a moment before stagnating in their one character trait, and the story is tired with nothing to latch onto. All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is fine if you really have the itch for a game in the vein of Danganronpa, but I would play many others before it.
Nairon played All in Abyss: Judge the Fake on PC with a provided review copy.
