Sleight of Hand gameplay trailer showcases occult card strategy in a noir world

Since its announcement in March, it's sounded like Sleight of Hand should be a fantastic stealth-action game in a magical noir setting — and now it looks that way, too. Its latest trailer, revealed in the Day of the Devs 2024: Game Awards Edition stream, showcases witchy card-slinging gameplay on the gritty streets of Steeple City for the first time.

In the stream, creator Joshua Boggs describes Sleight of Hand as, "If you took Metal Gear Solid and replaced the guns and tools with cards." This is followed by a shot of the protagonist, Lady Luck, trying to sneak past a guard, only to trigger a brass-backed exclamation point as she's spotted. The classic stealth references don't end there, either: Lady Luck is voiced by Debi Mae West, who played Meryl Silverburgh in Metal Gear Solid. (The new trailer begins at 37:20 in the below video).

Lady Luck is a retired occult detective who takes on one last case in order to destroy her former coven, which has a stranglehold on Steeple City. The game combines third-person stealth action with card-based strategy, and in the new trailer, these mechanics appear to work in hardboiled harmony. Cards in Sleight of Hand allow Lady Luck to see through walls, deploy smoke bombs, blind enemies, teleport, sling hexes and crush all the bones in someone's body, to name a few abilities.

Side note: On its face, Sleight of Hand's premise is eerily similar to Deconstructeam's The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a fabulous 2023 game starring an exiled witch who enacts revenge on her former coven by reading and building tarot decks. The games are entirely different otherwise — Sleight of Hand is third-person stealth action and Cosmic Wheel is an isometric narrative affair — and I don't point this out because I think anything nefarious is going on. I just thought it was interesting. Clearly there was something in the zeitgeist that made card-wielding witchy women a hot concept at both studios, and it's fascinating to see how the same conceit can be interpreted in such vastly different ways.

Sleight of Hand looks like a stylish new entry in the stealth-action genre, and its witchy noir universe seems to support a variety of approaches in each encounter. It's developed and published by New Zealand studio RiffRaff Games. RiffRaff was originally founded by Boggs in 2019 under the name MayDay, following the success of his spy-comic game, Framed. Tencent threw down an undisclosed amount to become a minority investor in the team in 2022, which is when it changed names to RiffRaff and hired up talent from around the globe.

Sleight of Hand doesn't have a firm release date, but it's on track to hit Steam, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass in 2025.