Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew was released recently, and is being graded by most reviewers as the second coming of Stealth Gaming Jesus. I beg to differ. It’s both competent and enjoyable, and it’s an intriguing story of undead pirates, fanatical inquisitors, and cursed treasures made sure that out of every game Mimimi has put out, it’s by far the most memorable. It’s Mimimi’s largest and most ambitious entry, but nowhere near its best. In gameplay terms especially, the challenge has definitively taken a hit and has been toned down quite a notch to accommodate as many different combinations of characters as possible. Is that a good thing? We’ll see.

Apologies in advance for using generic Steam Store images, but I’m currently away from my home PC and forgot to upload them.

Ask anyone what company can be considered a master at their craft, skillfully knitting intricate and complex stealth puzzles in the isometric stealth genre, and Mimimi is sure to show up. The team single-handedly revived a genre long dead since Commandos perished in the early 2000s. The excellent Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun innovated and brought the formula up to date, with intuitive keyboard controls, a wide range of information, good graphics, and big, complex dioramas staffed with guards and patrols that required players to squeeze out every ounce of ingenuity they had to prevail. The five different characters differed wildly from one another: A stealthy ninja; a heavy-hitting Samurai; a disguised Geisha; a Trap-Master and a mysterious Marksman came together to great effect, with each one of those packing a particular set of skills. Desperados 3 took the already existing framework laid out by Shadow Tactics and transposed it to the American Wild West, setting up, yet again, a new benchmark for the genre. It’s a shame that Shadow Gambit doesn’t feel like that much of a step forward.

The game puts you in control of Afia Manicato, an undead and very charming pirate with a sword lodged in her chest. First in the order of business is to free The Marley (a living ship with the power to restore memories) from the Inquisition’s grasp. Do that, and Afia will join forces with the Marley to find the previous ship’s treasure and bring back to life the members of its crew- all the while trying to put a stop to all the nonsense the Inquisition is trying to do. What follows is a classical pirate’s tale that’s best experienced unspoiled. Not that it does anything special with its premise, but if you love classical pirate stories, this should be incentive enough to keep you playing. The story did more to keep me engaged for longer than the gameplay loop itself.

Speaking of which, this is where Shadow Gambit’s biggest departure from previous titles can be found: instead of railing players into a specific path, missions intertwined with cutscenes, Mimimi’s latest opens up the world and places eight islands at the player’s disposition (not all at once) to explore and engage with. There’s a lot of going back and forth between the same level layouts and replaying the same scenario. These islands can vary quite a lot in terms of quality and complexity. Some, like the forge, can be unusually complex and demanding, and others feel like a chore you must undertake. There’s quite a lot of inconsistency. This open mission structure might allow for a lot of freedom but also makes the amount of times you need to visit each mission bloated and repetitive.

Visiting the same island over and over again turns a game that should be all about figuring out the best solutions for these intricate, well-built knots players must unravel, into a trivial affair. Compound this with the sacrifices the game had to make to accommodate so many different characters and it’s easy to see how some of the more curated levels of both Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics fare a lot better in comparison. Not only feel tailor-made for some of you, the player, to explore each character and its abilities in greater detail, but the limited character selections made sure that for each of the missions, challenges were built especially for their toolkits. I would much prefer that each of the missions was tailor-made for a specific kit of certain characters.

This freedom extends itself to the crew members players can take on missions. You can take three of eight total characters for each mission. Now, mathematically speaking, this means there are more than 500 different combinations of characters you can make. Here is where most of my problems with the game arise. The fact that the game must accommodate such a wide array of characters and different abilities inherently means that the puzzles need to be simplified to allow the player to take whatever combination of characters he enjoys the most. This lack of substantial puzzles is compounded even further by the lack of enemy variety, with most of them being introduced very early on during the first couple of missions. This is made even worse by the fact that enemy patrols and locations don’t change every time you visit an island. All this is to say that the game just feels a bit too repetitive.

This means that most knots that need untying are going to be rather simplistic, and I found myself figuring out the solution to each encounter long before any need for critical thinking arose. while I could attribute that to the game always making it easy to see information and providing players with all the tools they need to make decent decisions, the fact is that the puzzles are just way too simple.

There’s solace to be found in how fun it is to play around with the different characters and see what they can do, and despite the premise that the cursed pirates with supernatural abilities are absolutely up my alley in concept, the reality of it is that most of them feel a bit overpowered. Take, for example, Afia’s kit, most likely the one you’ll be most familiar with during the early game. Its blink ability is so strong that there were missions where for 20 minutes I was shaving off enemy troops just by using this one character. The reason this is even remotely possible is that all of the enemy’s locations and patrols had to be simplified to account for so many different playstyles. What ends up happening is that just by using one overpowered skill the game becomes devoid of any meaningful challenge and ends up feeling rather boring. Unlike Shadow Tactics and Desperados, I found myself very rarely needing to lure guards off their locations to set up a hidden Killzone, and that’s a damn shame, especially when the skills are so interesting, and the potential for amazing combos and combinations is there, but rarely taken advantage of. I’m playing Shadow Gambit as I’m writing this, and just came off a mission where, for the first 15 minutes I just used two characters to wipe out most of the guards.

I remember that Commandos managed to keep tension up by forcing players to take into account the timing of patrols, with the second or third mission still living rent-free on my head because a boat would, every so often, go down the river and mow down every Command in sight. In Shadow Gambit there’s so much leeway that it doesn’t stress or excite, only bothering more inquisitive minds. Different units needed different tactics to deal with, with tanks necessitating explosions, and officers were not so easily misled: Don’t carry enough stripes in your disguise and they’ll call you out and shoot you on the spot

In between every mission, Shadow Gambit takes Marley’s cursed crew back to its ol’deck. These in-between missions stage highlights are the comedic side-quests of crew members, with particular highlights to Toya’s (the cook) teaching a fish how to become a ninja. It’s as hilarious as it sounds, especially when you hear the fish calling Toya “sensei” in a very lispy voice. Every couple of missions or so a new crew member will become available, so by the end of the game, you’ll have unlocked all the crew to play around with. If you played Marvel Midnight Suns, the Marley is very similar to the Abbey.

Conclusion: Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is Mimimi’s swan song, one good, but not great game before the company sails to the sunset. Now, this is not to say the game is bad, it isn’t it’s quite good, and I would even go as far as to admit that it might do more to bring people into this kind of genre than any of its previous entries. Shadow Gambit is an easier game to get into, with its colorful characters, lighthearted and ridiculous story, and simpler stealth puzzles, it’s all great fun, but devoid of any meaningful challenge. It’s available on Steam and GoG, and the game will set you back 39,99€ or your regional equivalent.

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