Review – Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is the last game made by Mimimi Games, as they unfortunately went defunct in 2023. The publisher of the game is Hooded Horse Games. Mimimi Games continues to deliver on their famous formula of historical fantasy stealth games with The Cursed Crew, mixing real-time strategy with stealth mechanics with a backdrop of tropical islands and pirate ships.

Content Guide

Spiritual Content: The game focuses on a group of pirate spirits in a world that is between the living and the dead. There are many supernatural elements to the game, along with magic and ghosts. The enemies of the game are magicians known as the Inquisition, who are trying to burn the souls of the ghost pirates to permanently banish them. The inquisition does not seem to have any ties to a particular religion.

Language: During the playtime for the review, there was no strong language; however, due to random battle dialogue and the length of the game, there could be some strong language, especially due to it being one of the ESRB’s reasons for giving the game a T rating.

Violence: The game does involve killing and scenes of torture. The torture is mostly implied, as it’s not seen on screen other than the prisoners being locked up. Overall, the violence is not extreme as the game concentrates on stealth and effective kills.

Drugs and Alcohol: Pirates are often associated with drinking rum, and the game does feature and mention it; however, it’s not a major part of the story.

Negative Content: The game features pirates who are morally dubious characters.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew has an ESRB rating of T for teens and a PEGI age rating of 16.

Review

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew opens with a pirate trying to locate the famous Red Marley ship. The player will spend most of the early game playing as Afia Manicato, who is looking to join the crew herself. A key element of the game is unlocking party members, which is dictated by player selection.

The gameplay of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew has an emphasis on making stealthy and tactical choices when it comes to your approaches to situations. The gameplay mixes the real-time strategy genre with stealth mechanics such as luring enemies, hiding bodies, and staying out of view cones. While it is possible to be loud and go in guns blazing, it’s often just going to get the player killed, as the game wants you to play it carefully and methodically. This slow approach is enhanced further by having the ability to create save states, so if something goes wrong, a player can just resume from their past save state. Each character has their unique strength and weaknesses, which add to team composition. For example, some characters cannot climb vines or cannot swim. Each character has their play style, too, as some characters have longer kill animations or have stealthier body-hiding movement. They have special moves too, such as Afia being able to teleport and attack enemies or slow time temporarily. Other characters have abilities such as making instant cover or being able to create distractions. The special moves of team members are a crucial element of the game that allows for sound tactical approaches to any situation.

Graphically and visually, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is impressive. The game has wonderful map design and has a myriad of effects and aesthetics that make the game feel diverse in its stages. There were no visual issues throughout the review play time, and everything seemed to function as intended. The graphics were impressive not only for the characters themselves, but things like the ocean and pirate ships both offered a superb visual presentation. One other element that was a great attention to detail was the fact that the character portraits during conversations and cutscenes were animated with wind blowing through their hair or having subtle movements that gave the portraits some more life.

The sound design of the game was well crafted. It had a solid soundtrack that didn’t feel repetitive and helped add to the atmosphere. The voice acting was pleasant and sounded very polished and professional. The voicing of the characters was also well cast, as each of the characters sounded authentic to the dialect and accents they would have based on where they grew up, such as Afia having an islander accent or Gaellë having an Irish accent, both added depth to their characters. Sound design of the game was immersive and offered a lot of ambient and mood-setting effects that overall made the game feel even more cohesive and refined.

Overall, Shadow Tactics: Cursed Crew was a solid game. The game has a slow start, but once it gives the player full control, it opens up much more and has a better pace. Presentation-wise, the game didn’t leave anything desired as it was visually high quality and had solid sound design as well. Mechanically, the skills and level design seemed well balanced, and the variety of difficulty options added to helping players enjoy the game at any skill level.