All In Abyss: Judge The Fake Review (PC) Texas Hold Em The Anime

Balatro is a game that caught the world by storm, and thanks to it, other games have gone to Poker or other card games for their inspiration. One such game is All In Abyss: Judge the Fake. This game relies on Texas Hold ’em as the main gameplay mechanic in dealing with the enemies you come across, and it caught my eye.

Game Name: All In Abyss: Judge The Fake
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Acquire Corp
Publisher(s): Alliance Arts
Release Date: April 9th, 2025
Price: $15.99

In All In Abyss: Judge the Fake, you are Asuhu, a prodigy at gambling. She wants to make it big in the Poker world and has made her way into The City. To rise to the top, she has to face the Witches, high-stakes gamblers who put not just money on the line, but also their lives.

The Good

In All in Abyss: Judge the Fake, playing Texas Hold ’em is not all that you do. There is a point-and-click adventure that takes place where you have to gather clues about the boss of the chapter. It includes finding their weaknesses and finding out their strengths. Using that knowledge, you then have to create a game plan on how best to beat them. It was quite satisfying to figure out the clues and find the items or strategies needed to beat them. It adds additional depth and satisfaction when you get to beat the boss using the knowledge you were able to acquire through the point-and-click section of the game.

I was not ready for when you beat a boss in All in Abyss: Judge the Fake. A horror scene happens when you win or lose to a Witch. Winning gives a longer scene that describes a punishment that happens to the Witch you defeat. It is tailored towards each Witch, and it is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t comfortable with these scenes, you have the option to skip, and I recommend it if you’re not a fan of disturbing scenes and text explanations. These scenes give a lot of weight to the actual Texas Hold ’em game.

There is a good amount of skills you can add to your arsenal. You use SP to gain skills that require Luck points to use during a round of Texas Hold ’em. These skills can be forcing your opponent to continue the round without folding, it can be reducing the amount of damage you take from losing. There are even skills that let you choose which card will be chosen for one of the card flips in the round.

The Bad

All in Abyss: Judge the Fake has some amazing artwork. I wouldn’t be able to say this is a proper review, though, if I didn’t touch on some of the backgrounds being AI-generated from the concepts. It does help a little that they had their art team work on polishing it and making it match the aesthetic of the world, but it is still something I would have preferred that they had created from the ground up. The characters, the City backgrounds, and the overall playing cards were crafted by the art team, so it is weird to see them use AI to generate the background art for them.

There are periods in the game when you need to make money. The best way to make money is to play Texas Hold ’em with NPCs in The City. The Witch fights are interesting, but these NPC fights can feel way too tedious. Early on is fine as they have low health, but you will need to get a good hand later on and then force the opponent to continue to beat them, otherwise, you will be just doing chip damage each round, and it can feel boring. Especially when the NPCs start just being NPCs you have fought already anyway.

There is a good variety of skills in All in Abyss: Judge the Fake, but not all skills are worth grabbing. A lot of your best skills you can get early on in the game. It makes using SP to get the latter skills feel like just grinding to grind. High amount of work for not a lot of payoff.

The Verdict

Overall, All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is a fun combination of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Danganronpa. You have battles with cards as you use your skills to egg on your opponent and make them lose their life chips with death escape rooms as the stake of the big fights. If you are looking for a Balatro-type of game, this isn’t it, as the best parts of the game are fighting with the Witches.

All in Abyss: Judge the Fake is available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: All in Abyss: Judge the Fake was provided to us by Alliance Arts for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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