Even when surrounded by the onslaught of indie games at PAX Prime 2015, Lords of New York is the most indie of them all. Where the indie genre is becoming slowly saturated with roguelike, procedurally-generated actions titles inspired by the Souls series (not a bad thing really, but a very noticeable trend), Lords of New York is a poker RPG… set in the Prohibition era… with a narrative that's based on the mafia and transforms depending on your choices with the morality system. The concept alone may just the most niche, most innovating thing I've ever heard in a long time. And you'd be hard pressed to find another game that's as far outside the box than this is.
Now, let's be clear on what I mean when I say “poker RPG”. I don't mean actual online poker sites (there's one that's actually called PokerRPG.com) where you create a character, join friends, and advance in a career campaign like some kind of soft MMORPG. Erase that idea from your mind. Think of Lords of New York as the game Telltale would have made if it turned its popular Poker Night at the Inventory into a standard Telltale adventure. Keep the inventory screen and the multi-choice dialogue options, but just replace any combat or QTE sequences with battles at the poker table, and you've got a fairly strong idea of how Lords of New York operates.
The demo Lunchtime Studios showed at PAX Prime centers around Vince, a scruffy, slender, suited figure of the underground poker scene who recounts how he acquired his keen poker skills, which sends you back in time when he was sent to prison for slapping a judge. Whoops. Luckily, a conversation he strikes with a guard while he's in his cell opens the door for a trade. The guard will give Vince a favor if he can find and return the guard's missing club by the end of the day, and the only one who might know where it is would be The Boss, who has clout in the prison for his poker prowess.
This sets up the first taste at poker, which is Texas Hold 'Em (the Limit variant, I believe) between him and a potential friend named Lucky, who set up the match in the first place. The developer admits that Texas Hold 'Em is rather anachronistic given that this style of poker didn't get much play outside Texas until the late 1960s, but only having five-card stud or draw would have been far too limiting. The main twist is that Vince has special abilities that he can use including Glare which can intimidate other players into folding or checking and can peek at one of the opponent's whole cards. Levelling your character by reaching certain achievements in poker and in the story will unlock more abilities, which adds more strategy to the game once you're comfortable with its version of poker.
Once you win a few hands against The Boss (who hit about three flushes in a row, that bastard), he tells you the whereabouts of the club and you discover why the guard needs that specific club back (but I won't spoil it for you). But while the demo ends there, there's far more to the game including the morality system. Some items, equipment, and actions will give your character positive or negative points on the morality scale which will impact certain scenes later down the road.
The developers have also promised quite a lot of content including a boxing mini-game where you can manage a boxer as he climbs the ranks, in addition to a base where you can send henchmen out do the missions like the war table from Dragon Age: Inquisition. You will also be able to play the storylines of the federal agent Tony and the reporter Veronica, both of whom wish to crack the underground poker scene and learn the mob's intentions. Oh, and the developer is putting in the ability to slap anyone in the game you don't like. I'll buy it just for that.
While Lords of New York missed the goal of its initial Kickstarter in 2013, Lunchtime Studios will launch another Kickstarter campaign with a far more achievable goal mainly to cover the costs of voice-acting. It recently won the Perforce 20/20 Game Innovators Contest and The Intel Buzz Festival and hopes to release in Summer 2016 for PC, Mac, and iOS.
