Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

Who likes ghost pirates and the hunt for "Booty"? Well, booty, as in sunken treasure, not the other stuff the word is used for these days. I've just reviewed the Sea of Thieves expansion Monkey Island, so it was only natural to go straight to Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which is more or less about the same supernatural sailors. Shadow Gambit, The Cursed Crew is available from August 17th for PC, where I've played it, as well as on Xbox and Playstation 5. The game is developed by Mimimi, a German developer.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is set in the Caribbean, when pirates were at their peak, and is about Afia Manicato, as the main character is aptly named, who is in search of her ship, the "Red Marley." The ship's name is a Monkey Island reference, and the game's tone leans heavily on the atmosphere of the Monkey Island games. Afia has the misfortune of being undead and has the sword that killed her sticking through her stomach, which is even used as a game mechanic.

The Inquisition has come to the Caribbean and they want to eradicate everything supernatural, as it is satanic. However, they make use of the supernatural themselves in their hunt for the ghostly pirates. After the introduction, Afia is approached by a voice that turns out to be the ship itself, which wants to be freed from the extremist Inquisition and its not-so-pure methods. The ship then becomes a central character as it has its own not-so-pure ulterior motives. It's a great story that takes you on an adventure full of intrigue and mystery, and the atmosphere is fantastic as the Caribbean islands you explore are full of detail. In addition, there are a lot of characters having small conversations about the everyday lives of ordinary mortals. It gives a great sense of a vibrant and colorful world.

Afia finds her ship after a few missions, and here you get a choice of who you want to bring back to life on the otherwise dead ship. The person you bring back to life becomes a character you can take with you on your missions, and each of them has abilities that allow them to do the things they need to do during the game's ten courses. This mechanic gets more and more exciting as you can choose from eight other characters that you unlock along the way. They each have cool abilities that allow you to complete the missions in the way that suits you best. This strategic approach to the missions is very entertaining and makes the levels highly replayable.

After finding the ship, you must then hunt for the pirate Moredechai, its former owner, and a possible treasure, which is a stereotypical pirate thing to do. The story is fun and entertaining, full of humor and great ideas. The voice acting is a bit hit and miss, however, and not all the characters are equally successful, but overall they are all pretty funny. It can just take a bit out of the experience that the otherwise good script isn't treated as well as it deserves. But okay, it doesn't seem like the developers had a huge budget to play with, so it's approved.

Shadow Gambit, The Cursed Crew, is an isometric stealth game. A game where you have to sneak through the courses and do it with as much style as possible. You can choose to kill the enemies or you can choose to do it all without killing if you're more of a pacifist. As mentioned earlier, you have the protagonist Afia and eight other characters, each with unique abilities that help you sneak around the large courses. Afia can make an attack with the sword in her stomach, teleporting to unsuspecting enemies and killing them without them knowing. The Doctor can throw out spores to turn enemies around on her patrols, and she can also create temporary bushes to hide in. Pinkus can take over the enemies and create chaos behind enemy lines, and so on and so forth. These mechanics make the missions super exciting to approach, as you have to choose the abilities you think will best accomplish the task at hand. Personally, I liked to test drive the course, just trying to get as far as possible to see where the enemies were. These test missions rarely ended well, but it made it much easier to make a plan. I liked this approach, and it probably made my time in the game a bit longer than others that approach the missions more directly.

As mentioned, the islands you have to sneak around on are seen from an isometric perspective, which means you see everything from a skewed angle from above. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew has the cool feature that you can zoom out really far and zoom in really close. If you zoom out to maximum, you see enemies and your own characters as pieces on a map, and it's a great way to get an overview and make a battle plan for how you want to approach everything. However, you can also zoom in to see friends and enemies up close, as well as the cone of vision they have, which allows you to see where they're looking so you don't get spotted. If you are, an alarm will sound and the enemies will leave their routes to look for you in the bushes and shadows. If you remain unseen, the alarm will disappear again. However, the artificial intelligence of the enemies is not the best and I often found that they were very easy to fool when they were paranoid and looking for your character. Unfortunately, this could often be exploited to ambush them and murder them one by one, which I don't think is the point of the game. Again, this is probably due to the tight budget, and there are several examples of the game's ideas failing a bit by only working up to a certain point. It's a shame, because there's a lot to like here.

All in all, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a really exciting experience, full of great ideas and atmosphere, but unfortunately held back by the limited resources available to the developers. However, the game was a great experience overall, and I'm looking forward to a possible sequel if they can develop the game's ideas just a little bit more.