[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Only Cards through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Only Cards
Release Date: September 4, 2025
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Publisher: Grim's Studio
Developer: Grim's Studio
Time Spent: 3 Hours 40 Minutes*
Playthrough Videos on YouTube
Well, here we are with our first review for an adult video game, although not rated by the ESRB. What initially drew my attention to Only Cards was the UI aspect; that you are using a desktop background as the primary interface was a novel choice, considering that it is essentially a visual novel with an integrated deck-building puzzle game. The story, too, was initially intriguing, although the final explanation fell beyond flat for me.
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Your perspective is that of Detective McSnoop, who is more or less pulled out of retirement to help the local police department's CEI Division (Cyber Erotic Investigations) after a string of seemingly random deaths. When McSnoop joins the story, a sixth man has just been found dead after visiting an OnlyFans adjacent site called Only-Simps. Due to Only-Simp's encryption policies, the images that the CEI has are only partials that have to be reconstructed to know who is in the picture and how it might be connected to the five other open murder cases. McSnoop is brought in because of his expertise in working around encrypted images, which is how he's brought into the story. It's all very silly and doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it beyond the initial explanation, but you run with it anyway.
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The in-game explanation for calling in each of the women for questioning feels a bit odd. Each day is accessed by opening a separate text document, which are grouped by Chapters one through seven. Under each of the Chapter text documents is a picture with the woman's name and an unrelated "bonus" picture that you can unlock as you earn higher scores during the puzzle stage. When I played the first five chapters, I played the text/visual novel portion first, but then realized that it felt like I was supposed to 'decrypt' the image first and then call in the woman in the picture. So for Chapter 6, I solved the puzzle first and then read the chapter, but the story that unfolded assumed that I hadn't already looked at the picture, which is taken by your partner at the end of the visual novel section.
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The puzzle portion of the game is where the deck building comes in, and was an interesting take. For each picture, you start out with a certain number of pieces already filled in on your square grid. You are dealt five cards that are a combination of pieces from the puzzle, as well as cards that have varying effects that can help you solve the puzzle in fewer turns. There are cards that pixelate blank spaces on your puzzle, but some require a condition to be met, such as only if the space is surrounded by three unsolved spaces. Any pieces you incorrectly place go into your discard pile, but can be drawn again when you run through your deck or if you have a special card that lets you pull from the discard pile. Some puzzles introduce complications, such as garbage cards that fill up your hand with useless cards, while some spaces won't let you put down a piece if you have a garbage card in your hand; thankfully, there is a card that gets rid of all of the garbage cards in your hand. You can build up your hand of cards between solving puzzles by using money earned from solving puzzles, but only once between puzzles by buying one of six randomized cards from the shop.
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Everything up to this point has been tame and definitely wouldn't warrant being an adult game. Even the 'decrypted' pictures for the main game are fairly unassuming. None of the women are naked and are all wearing underwear, one might even say "tasteful", which is reinforced when the women are brought in for questioning. Nearly everyone reiterates that taking photos of themselves and selling them to people online is perfectly legal, even when McSnoop tries to shame them for questionable, immoral behavior. A lot of McSnoop's questioning I found to be annoying and degrading, like something you'd hear from a 1970s cop, all, "Back in my day, a real man would watch Hot Plumbers 3: Laying Pipe and not pay for a picture of a woman in her underwear licking a bible." The bonus pictures are where the nudity arises, but only in pictures four through six, and even then, it's closer to what you could see from Titanic than an NSFW subreddit; the first three bonus pictures are similar to the in-game puzzles with women in their underwear. I do wish that there had been some narrative integration of the bonus pictures, or maybe I just missed the brief mention that they were also pictures from Only-Simps, but McSnoop had cracked the case before needing to call in these six other women.
In two instances, I had to start a puzzle over from the beginning because I accidentally softlocked myself from being able to solve the puzzle. In several puzzles, there are conditions such as a red cock on a blank space that meant you "Can't solve this piece if you've already solved 10 other pieces," or a blue water droplet icon on a blank space indicating that "You must not have garbage cards in your hand to solve it." What was frustrating about these and other similar conditions was that if you couldn't meet the specific condition, for example, if you placed 11 pieces and still didn't solve for the one piece with a red clock, then if you tried to place a puzzle piece on it, the game would reject it, but would still allow you to continue with the puzzle. You could reach the end and have any number of blank spaces on your puzzle because you failed to meet the conditions. I feel that the game should immediately let the player know that, because they failed to meet a certain condition, they will have to start the puzzle over immediately. This happened when I only had a space with a blue water droplet icon, and I still had two garbage cards along with the one remaining puzzle piece and two unrelated cards that I couldn't use.
I did experience a game-breaking glitch after Chapter 4, but never again after that. I had finished Chapter 4, both the visual novel and the puzzle, and had saved and exited the game. When I came back later, when I clicked "Continue" on the home screen, it immediately brought up a puzzle, but without access to any puzzle pieces or cards on the bottom of the screen. I tried both forfeiting and quitting the puzzle, hoping that it would take me back to the home screen, and I could start the puzzle over. Unfortunately, selecting either Quit or Forfeit brought me back to the main menu screen, and clicking "Continue" just brought me back to the broken puzzle again. This required me to restart the game, which meant having to redo the first four puzzles again, although this time I had a better idea of the game mechanics and how the cards worked and when best to use them. Another bug I encountered was during the Bonus 6 puzzle when I used a card to show which of the unsolved spaces included the woman's lips. The placement seemed odd, but since it was the beginning of the puzzle and I had only a few pieces placed, I thought that the angle and pose were purposefully misleading. But no, the lips icon had been placed over the woman's butt.
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Like I mentioned at the beginning, the ending of the game was dumb. I won't spoil the explanation for why these six men died immediately after looking at a picture they purchased of a woman in her underwear, but it's very underwhelming in a way that made me think, "Wait, that's it?" McSnoop and his colleague Claire even come up with a couple of theories that would have been better conclusions, such as some connection between several of the men having paid more than $1,000 for their respective fatal pictures. I don't know if I was expecting something supernatural, but what actually happened was so mundane that it warranted a furrowed brow instead of an eyeroll. There was one point where I thought it was going to have to do with all of the men being in debt and having taken out loans from an illegal money lender company, and then they were killed, which isn't the most innovative story, but I feel it's slightly better than everyone dying of a panic/heart attack.
Yes, laugh all you want at me critiquing the story of an adult-rated (but not ESRB-rated) video game where you complete puzzles of cartoon women in their underwear, but you have to admit that the initial premise is intriguing. Coupled with the deck-building mechanic and the desktop UI, it had the promise of something a little more than what Only Cards ended up being.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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