Commandos-Like Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew - ghost pirates stealth strategy from Mimimi Games

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/af...mimimis-most-joyful-stealth-strategy-game-yet

After 7 hours, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew might be Mimimi's most joyful stealth strategy game yet​

It's a pirate's life for me


Ahead of the launch of its Steam Next Fest demo next week, I've been playing a substantial early build of Mimimi Games' latest stealth strategy game, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. After delighting us with Edo-period Japan in Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun and the rootin' tootin' tales of the Wild West in Desperados 3, Mimimi have taken a firm step outside their comfort zone with the high seas island-hopping of Shadow Gambit, offering up an altogether different approach to their tried and tested stealth antics.

As you might have guessed from the name, its eponymous crew aren't bound by the laws of reality in this latest tactical outing, and their extensive suite of magic abilities really open up the playing field for some creative takedowns. But the canvas on which you're painting these elaborate murders has morphed since the days of Desperados 3, with its handful of islands now offering multiple points of entry, a myriad of different missions and objectives and - for the first time ever - repeat visits to the same locations. It's quite the sea change from Mimimi's previous work, but rest assured: the crown jewels of the Mimimi stealth strategy experience certainly haven't been lost to Davey Jones' locker in the process. If nothing else, this is the most fun I've had with a Mimimi game, period - and I cannot wait to dive back in properly when it launches on August 17th.

The build I played is a slightly more expansive version of what you'll play during the Next Fest demo, but the core of it - the game's opening gambit, so to speak - is effectively the same. You'll begin as lone pirate Afia Manicato, the lass with the cutlass sticking out her chest, as she rocks up in Angler's Grave. She's looking to heist a certain ghost ship by the name of the Red Marley out from beneath the very unlikeable noses of the Inquisition, a deadly force in this corner of the Lost Caribbean who don't take kindly to ladies with cutlasses through their hearts - or any undead, magical beings for that matter.

As you may have seen from yesterday's new trailer at the PC Gaming Show, Afia's arch nemesis is an Inquisitor called Ignacia, and you'll be dispatching her goons all across the archipelago as you attempt to liberate your home from their puritanical yoke. Afia has history with the Red Marley, you see, and she's determined to solve the riddle of its former owner, the legendary pirate Moredechai. To do this, she'll need to rebuild Moredechai's old crew, resurrecting them with mysterious Black Pearls (which are, of course, in the possession of the Inquisition), and finding a wealth of magical artefacts (also in the hands of the Inquisition) in order to help decipher it.

Teresa is a dab hand at taking at pesky tower guards, but you'll need to make sure the sound of the body falling to the floor doesn't alert other guards nearby.
Accumulating these two things will form the backdrop of Shadow Gambit's first act, and you'll be visiting its clutch of islands multiple times to stock up on them. At first glance, these objectives may come as something of a disappointment. They certainly aren't as playful as, say, rounding up your gang of exceedingly drunk cowboys after a heavy night out to defend a ranch in Desperados 3, for example, but the freedom both your crew and your point of entry on these islands goes a surprisingly long way in helping to restore any perceived lack of fun and creativity.


Afia herself feels like the distant cousin of Corvo and Emily Kaldwin from Dishonored, her ability to stab foes with her dagger and blink dash across spaces unseen making her the perfect introduction to this world of nefarious swashbuckling. She can also freeze time for short periods, forcing guards to stop in their tracks so her crewmates can either run through their sight cones without them raising the alarm, or take down one of their pals right in front of them - if they're quick, that is.

She was a key member of my early missions in Shadow Gambit, but I quickly came to favour skeleton chef pirate Toya and sharpshooter Teresa as well. Toya can plant Japanese katashiro markers on guards or points on the ground, allowing him to instantly teleport to (and attack) those locations from anywhere on the map. He also has a handy (and wide-ranging) flute whistle to distract guards to tempt them off their patrol routes, and his cookery-flavoured voice quips make him an exceedingly good hang while you're filleting your latest acolyte and dumping them in a bush.

Ah yes, the classic rock fall. It wouldn't be a Mimimi game without one.

Teresa, meanwhile, is your classic sniper of the gang, able to pick off guards from afar as long as she has a clear line of sight. She'll need to retrieve that deadly crossbow dart before she can strike again, however, so you'll need to deploy her talents carefully in order to make the most of her. She can fire crossbow darts that blind enemies as well, decimating their sight cones while the rest of your gang slip through the cracks in their vision. Not bad considering she herself doesn't actually have any eyes.

Witch doctor Suleidy has plenty to recommend her as well, especially her ability to conjure up cover bushes on the fly to keep your crew hidden from view. The spirited Pinkus Von Presswald, meanwhile, is the spy of the group. He's able to possess low-level guards and use their soulless husks to chat and distract their colleagues, and he also has a very Cooper-style coin toss (being a rich, pompous sod), albeit with a shorter range of effect than Toya's whistle.

Alas, the preview build stopped short of letting me try the anchor-wielding John Mercury and canonist Gaelle Le Bris from the reveal trailer, and there's also skelly fisherman Quentin Aalbers waiting in the wings as well. But even with only five of its eventual eight characters to sample here, I found each and every combo I tried worked an absolute treat, offering up plenty of ways to solve its deviously designed puzzle box locations, and all without feeling like I was repeating the same strategies or just going through the motions with different crew mates.

As in Desperados 3, you can pause the action at any time to queue up attacks that happen all at once (see left). And trust me, judging by the complexity of some rooms on the island (see right), you're going to need it. That, and frequent taps of the F5 quick-save button.
I'd be loathe to spoil any of each island's secrets - those are best discovered for yourself - but I will say that even doing two missions on the same island managed to feel substantially different from one another. First, one took place during the day, while the other was set during the night, offering up a whole new range of sightlines, pockets of light and patrol routes to get to grips with. And second, even approaching the same area from a different angle felt like I was scratching a different part of my brain than I had just hours earlier. You see, each mission doesn't just end when you complete your objective. This is fundamentally a heist game at its core, so getting out is just as important as making your way in. To escape, you'll need to find a 'Tear Into The Below', a magical doorway that opens up a portal back to the Red Marley, and due to the unholy nature of them, they are, of course, guarded and sealed by special Custodes priests.


You'll find a handful of these Tears dotted around each island, and I ended up going for the same one twice on a couple of missions, just by virtue of it being the one closest to me. But Mimimi, being the clever and tricksy folks they are, have designed these spaces to continually test your knowledge of them - and yes, even something as simple as approaching a courtyard from a different doorway felt fresh and exhilarating on the second attempt. Of course, it's entirely possible that these feelings may start to become rather more ragged after a third, fourth and possibly even fifth visit through these spaces - it's hard to tell right now exactly how often we'll be return journeys to each of Shadow Gambit's islands - but for now I remain impressed by each space's versatility and sense of challenge.

If you keep zooming the camera out, you transition into a bird's eye view of the entire island, complete with objective markers and patrol routes for every Inquisition guard.
There's a lot more I could say about Shadow Gambit. There's an open air library on one island that's a particular delight for team aerial takedowns, as is the prison fortress that hugs the crater of a magical volcano. Carefully placed rocks and cranes also make the mind wander, and while not all members of your crew are able to swim in the shallows, the ones that can are able to pop up like sharks to snuff out wayward guards on lonely docks and spits of sand. Each island is a veritable playground of possibility in Shadow Gambit, and the thought of having only sampled a couple of them with just over half of its final crew to hand just makes me even more eager to see what other treasures are lying in wait in the final game.

So if you were at all worried that Mimimi might have bitten off more than they could chew with Shadow Gambit, you can set your mind at ease. The Cursed Crew is looking pretty ship shape right now, and you should absolutely try out the Next Fest demo for yourself when it launches on Steam next week, on June 19th. You should also mark your calendars for its full release while you're at it, too. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is coming to Steam and the Epic Games Store on August 17th.

 

[DemonKing]

Demo is pretty good - if you liked Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 you'll like this (unless you really didn't like the magical witch character in Desperados 3 - as it seems pretty much the whole crew are witches now). Controls seems very smooth on PC.

Hopefully demo saves port over to the full release as I'd rather not do all the tutorial stuff again but so far it looks good albeit a game where the apple hasn't fallen very far from the tree.

 

[Child of Malkav]

I'll play it when it comes out, fully. Not installing Steam for this.

 

[Infinitron]

Demo trailer:



https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1545560/view/6476786763434505512

 

[Lemming42]

Only played a little of the demo but I'm really pleased with it so far, I think all fans of Desperados 3 will be. The setting and characters seem like a lot of fun, and getting to choose the order in which you gain each crewmember is an interesting twist (I went for the Doctor).

Only complaint is that it seems a bit easy too far, though obviously, I've only done the tutorial and half the first level. Endless Desperados 3 playthroughs have made me wise to Mimimi's tricks.

 

[Lemming42]

Finished the demo. Here's a few other random things:

- They've made it so that contextual actions are done by holding down left click for a couple seconds, rather than ctrl + left click. This was presumably done to eliminate the occasional accidental fuckups you'd do in Desperados 3, but honestly, I'm actually somehow having more issues with this new system. Not a big deal though.

- Oddly, almost all abilities have a non-lethal variant. Firearms don't, but fuck them anyway. The main character can knock people out with her Dishonored-knockoff Blink skill, and even the sniper can fire non-lethal rounds. There's no disadvantage to these, they work identically to the lethal variants. It's a strange choice by the devs, it's like if they let you keep the joke knockout variants of all your skills in Desperados 3 from that level where everyone's hungover. All characters can tie up enemies too, so non-lethal now plays almost the exact same as lethal, which is a bit of a shame because it's eliminated some of the additional restriction and challenge. Basically they've gone all the way - in Shadow Tactics non-lethal seemed to be a total afterthought, in Desperados 3 it was viable as a playstyle but not the intended way to play, in this it's fully supported and there's almost no reason not to do it.

- People who thought Desperados 3 was a bit too linear will really like the maps in this one, you get multiple entry points and can approach from any angle you want, with objectives spread out all over the place. Personally I quite liked Desperados 3's more linear "here's the first challenge area, here's the next, here's the next" approach, but the freeform maps in this give you a ton of options to approach each challenge.

- Getting to choose which order you get the crew in is kind of cool, and you get a pretty good run-down of each team member before you recruit them to let you try to build the exact team you want. Another double-edged sword though; it does look like there'll be none of the Shadow Tactics/Desperados style missions where half the team go for a piss or whatever leaving you to tackle a level with an unusual team-up of two or three characters.

Overall it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect, another Mimimi game where they're putting everything they've learned so far to good use. Not sure if it's quite going to top Desperados 3 which is one of the best games ever made IMO but it's definitely going to be another rock-solid entry into Mimimi's line-up.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Any point in going non lethal?

 

[Lemming42]

Not especially, the game doesn't care any more than it did in Shadow Tactics or Desperados 3. It's still technically an additional layer of challenge, since you've got to tie people up which takes an extra second or two, and you can't use regular firearms, but it's pretty trivial now and plays almost identically to lethal. I just do KO runs out of habit, it's how I've played all these games right back to Commandos.

I get the feeling they made the decision to add non-lethal variants of every skill some time relatively late in development, seems to be a bit of an afterthought. There's a couple of objectives where the characters explicitly talk about how they'll have to kill enemies to proceed, but then you can just KO the enemies and the game continues as normal. Mimimi have never really quite got the hang of how to design a proper, mechanically-distinct non-lethal run like the original Desperados had.

As in Desperados 3, some of the enemies are pretty likeable as well, so that might give you a story reason to tie them up rather than stab them to death. Some of the Inquisition people are kinda funny and, just going by the little bit of the story you get in the demo, they might even sort of have a point - as far as I can tell, they're anti-magic, which seems harsh until you see that the heroes are a bunch of assholes who keep using magic to tear people apart. So there's that.

 

[Child of Malkav]

I didn't find going non lethal in previous titles difficult but knowing there's no consequence/meaning to it in this one as well then I'll just go all out. Meh. In Robin Hood and the legend of Sherwood going non lethal meant that you attracted more people to join you. Which was good to keep resource production high for future missions. Oh well.

 

[Jinn]

For those curious about the demo progress carrying over to the full game, from the Steam Forum FAQ:

Will my progress carry over to the full game?

Yes, we're planning to implement a way for you to skip the demo content in the full version. So you can play the demo and then continue with the full game at the point where the demo ends.

However, your stats (for example "how many enemies killed") won't carry over to the full game.

 

[Zombra]

I very much enjoyed in Desperados the option to make the extra effort to spare lives when I didn't think someone especially deserved to die. (Your average prison guard might not be a saint but it doesn't seem right to murder them wholesale; a bandit who at best makes a living threatening the innocent is a different story.) Weird for Mimimi to take all the teeth out of that decision and make it a straight up "Be a murderer for no reason Y/N?" Maybe they wanted to "Disneyize" things and remove blood and violence for players who don't like that but why even have lethal options at that point? I guess there are different markets for blood and no blood, but now they're alienating the market of me, the market that wants them to make up their minds

 

[Gahbreeil]

I'd rather have a remake of Robin Hood: Legacy of Sherwood. Who's with me?!

 

[Lemming42]

I very much enjoyed in Desperados the option to make the extra effort to spare lives when I didn't think someone especially deserved to die. (Your average prison guard might not be a saint but it doesn't seem right to murder them wholesale; a bandit who at best makes a living threatening the innocent is a different story.) Weird for Mimimi to take all the teeth out of that decision and make it a straight up "Be a murderer for no reason Y/N?" Maybe they wanted to "Disneyize" things and remove blood and violence for players who don't like that but why even have lethal options at that point? I guess there are different markets for blood and no blood, but now they're alienating the market of me, the market that wants them to make up their minds

The whole thing seems to have a very Disney-ish feel this time around, even more so than Desperados 3. Again it's hard to get a full picture from the relatively scant story offered in the demo, but the Inquisition doesn't really seem to do anything other than really hate ghosts, but all the ghosts you get to meet are cackling sociopaths who enthuse over their ability to painfully kill people using supernatural advantages (their cursed ship even grants them the ability to travel back through time to redo stuff - the in-universe explanation for quicksaving and quickloading - which it's hinted that they previously used freely to murder random Inquisition soldiers who literally stood no chance against them). Even the main antagonist doesn't really inspire much antipathy, she actually seems far less comically nasty than the player characters are. Maybe later on it'll turn out the Inquisition just razes whole villages for no reason or something, I dunno.

Obviously the story is not meant to be taken seriously and it's basically just an excuse to have some larger-than-life characters to run around with, as in D3, but I never met any enemy in the demo who there was a convincing reason to kill rather than KO, especially given that mechanically it plays the same. Sort of feels like Dishonored, where not only is knocking people out as easy as killing them, but you also very scarcely ever get given any reason to do otherwise, to the point where you start to wonder why you're carrying a pistol around everywhere with you that you're never given a good reason to use, and which would probably actually be a hindrance to you if you did use it given that you're meant to be aiming for stealth.

Not really complaining, but it does feel even more odd here than it did in Desperados 3. I'm glad the option exists but it feels like Mimimi still aren't quite getting why having the option - and extra challenge - was so much fun in Desperados 1. I imagine the reason was that they didn't want non-lethal players to miss out on all the cool ways to combine and chain the various skills, but that should at least have been offset by only one character carrying the rope to tie people up or w/e.

 

[DemonKing]

I'd rather have a remake of Robin Hood: Legacy of Sherwood. Who's with me?!

 

[Gahbreeil]

In my defense, the game is unplayable on modern PCs. The copy you can obtain on Steam at least. A remake/enhanced edition would be great.

 

[Lemming42]

You can get a working copy off gog, I think. Runs fine on Windows 10 for me.

It would be great to get direct remakes of that and Desperados though, on the modern engine with full 360 movement.

 

[Zombra]

The whole thing seems to have a very Disney-ish feel this time around. All the ghosts you get to meet are cackling sociopaths who enthuse over their ability to painfully kill people.

Interesting. Amplifies the strangeness of the lethal/nonlethal options. I'm 100% down to play a cartoony game about unrepentant murderers. Look at the original Overlord for example; great, funny game about puppy kicking eeeeevil and I doubt it mentally scarred anyone in real life or turned them into school shooters. It's okay for a game to be about bad guys and even murderous bad guys.

Gonna guess that Mimimi started with cruel pirates and then some exec somewhere said "But you can't glorify murderers!" and Mimimi said fine, there are rubber swords too.

 

[Spacer's Nugget]

Commandos 4 when?

 

[DemonKing]

Commandos 4 when?

I think the IP holders have said they're working on a new title - but doubtful it'll match the quality of previous releases or the Mimimi games if it releases at all.

 

[Morgoth]

Commandos 4 when?

That's already being made by the same bums that gave us the disastrous Commandos 2 HD remaster. Just cross them off your list.

 

[Child of Malkav]

In my defense, the game is unplayable on modern PCs. The copy you can obtain on Steam at least. A remake/enhanced edition would be great.

The gog one works well, you need a dll file to play it on win 10 without lag or whatever. But I just play an older, portable version.

 

[Zombra]

I tried out some of the demo - the introductory tutorial and one of the 'training rooms' for a 2nd crewmate - and immediately loved this. It's more of what we've come to expect from Mimimi, but clearly going hog wild with all kinds of wacky powers that can totally change the landscape. The natural first impression is that all this overpowered chicanery will make the game too easy ...... but I know Mimimi better than that. Every intention of a D1P.

 

[Infinitron]

Gonna guess that Mimimi started with cruel pirates and then some exec somewhere said "But you can't glorify murderers!" and Mimimi said fine, there are rubber swords too.

This game was co-funded by the German government, so this could be exactly what happened.

 

[Grauken]

Gonna guess that Mimimi started with cruel pirates and then some exec somewhere said "But you can't glorify murderers!" and Mimimi said fine, there are rubber swords too.

This game was co-funded by the German government, so this could be exactly what happened.

now you all know how we feel

 

[Infinitron]

They're very frank about the downsides of this game's design goals here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/af...t-their-next-game-to-be-restricted-by-realism

After Desperados 3, Mimimi didn't want their next game to be "restricted by realism"​

Creative director tells us about the making of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew



Ever since the makers of Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics announced their brand new squad tactics game, I've been dying to get my hands on Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. While Mimimi's previous games took place in mostly grounded historical settings, Shadow Gambit is about magical undead pirates hunting for mysterious booty and fighting a persecutive Inquisition. This shift into the supernatural is quite the change for Mimimi, which creative director Dominik Abé tells me was partly to challenge themselves as designers, but also so players could have a bit more fun with how they approached its plentiful stealth encounters.

"One thing we wanted for sure was that we had something that's not grounded in a realistic setting," Abé tells me. "That was a requirement for all the pitches we did internally, and that's because we wanted to improve on the gameplay. We were restricted by realism, so that was a core pillar. It had to be something fantasy, or sci-fi or something non-realistic."

Shadow Gambit is a strategic stealth game in which you'll be captaining a band of pirates around the Lost Caribbean, sneaking into enemy encampments, stabbing unsuspecting guards in the back, and making off with your treasure undetected. Each crew member comes with their own set of unique abilities, and combining them to create ingenious, perfectly executed takedowns is all part of the fun.

During its conception stage, the ideas for Shadow Gambit came thick and fast, Abé says, and it was their lead writer who eventually struck upon the idea of pirates. Abé is keen to cite pirate games such as Monkey Island being bigger inspirations here than, say, the blockbuster film series Pirates Of The Caribbean, but he also says he was surprised by just how few pirate games there actually are these days. "You think there must be like 1000 pirate movies and 1000 pirate games and then you look it up and you’re like, 'Oh, there aren't that many,'" he laughs. "For children, it's a core fantasy for playing and the toys and stuff, but there’s not so much as I would expect to be out there in movies and literature."

Abé sees this as a positive, though, saying there are "still a lot of things to explore" in the pirate world despite the inevitable comparisons to Jerry Bruckheimer's mega films. Some of the marquee locations we'll be exploring, for example, are quintessential pirate territory, such as the shanty town that lead pirate Afia visits in the game's opening. But there will also be a Treasure Island-style setting, Abé tells me (which was "quite hard because it's pretty empty, the classic Treasure Island," he concedes) as well as a sea fortress and a ship graveyard.

"It wasn’t easy to come up with very original settings or locations," he admits. "That was quite a struggle, but I'm happy with some of the things we haven’t shown yet, and I think they'll push the boundaries there."


Timing is everything when taking out guards in Shadow Gambit, but you can always quick save and quick load if you make a mistake.

Of course, part of the challenge stemmed from their own decision to create more open-ended locations this time, rather than bespoke scenarios like they did for Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3. "Blowing up a bridge was something we couldn't do in this game, because we have these locations we wanted to reuse," Abé explains. "That doesn't work well if you want to visit it, like, four times. That was what we had to rethink most."

There are still distinct areas within its larger islands, I should stress. In my recent preview, for example, an island known as Iron Bay had a foreboding prison to the north surrounding an open volcano vent, an open-air library to the east and some swampy docklands to the south, with different missions focused on different parts of the map. But Abé also confesses that their lack of 'blowing up a bridge' moments may end up making Shadow Gambit's islands feel more "generic" as a result, and he speaks candidly about the challenges they faced in recreating those more bespoke and memorable moments that defined their previous games.

"Something like [Desperados 3's] wedding scene, we can’t pull off that easily right now [in Shadow Gambit]," he says. "In the beginning, this openness has this drawback that it's a little bit more generic, I would say, with you revisiting these locations. But we try to work against this with, for example, the witchy island where you see this giant plant hat and the island is like a living plant. We've tried to have ideas that work with the structure of the missions."

He also points to the character missions that will define Shadow Gambit's later stages as being another opportunity where they could create "a tighter connection between story and objective". Unlike Shadow Gambit's regular missions, where you get to choose your landing party of pirates to take with you, these trips will require particular crewmates to be present, allowing Mimimi to be "more personal and specific in our design," says Abé.


Securing more Black Pearls will allow you to resurrect more undead crew mates to join your ranks.

Some of these character missions will be solo endeavours, Abé continues, while others will let you have more crewmates along for the ride. But whatever combination of characters you end up bringing with you, Abé hopes they’ll be entertaining, to say the least. "Sometimes [they’re] maybe too playful," he laughs. "Some are rather weird and strange missions, but I think they'll be fun."

I still think there’s plenty of Mimimi’s trademark playfulness to be found in their regular missions as well, simply because the chance to bring whoever you want with you opens up a tantalising number of possibilities to set your mind alight. But designing for this number of variables was another thing entirely, Abé says.

"In the beginning, it felt quite risky, but we really wanted to take that risk," he explains. "We tested a lot. I think if it had been bigger, we would have needed permanent testing feedback teams or something like that. I don't know if we test a lot compared to other companies, but for us, it was a project where we knew, 'Okay we have to test a lot,' so we'd get team feedback."

These groups consisted of Mimimi veterans, newer Mimimi devs who had less experience with their work, as well as trusted players from their wider community – and after a year and a half of back and forth, Abé says they finally had something that felt like "it's working."


Many of Shadow Gambit's locations are deviously plotted with well covered patrols and overlapping sight cones.

"That was a big relief," he says, "because that moment could have been like, now, with only two months ago or something. Sometimes it's like that. You don't know until the end if it's going to work out. But I think now for over a year or something, we've known the core is working and now we really have to tweak and polish it."

Abé and his team have also worked in incentives to encourage players to switch up their strategies, too. This takes the form of Vigour, which lets characters earn more experience points if you haven't used them in a while. It was a "concern" that players would just use the same three crewmates all the time, Abé explains, but they also found during their testing that if players just gave some crewmates a chance, then they’d become surprisingly fast favourites afterwards.

"We saw players feeling comfortable with three characters, and then they would just test another character for like, five minutes, and be like 'Oh that's not powerful,' and they wouldn't change. […] Then we were like, 'Okay, play with him for another half an hour,' and then they’d come back saying, 'Okay, this is the best character!' We had that so many times, which is super cool, I think."


When you first resurrect a new character, you can complete three optional tutorials for them so you can get to grips with their unique skill sets. Alas, Gaëlle was one of the few characters who wasn’t available to play as during my preview build, so we’ll have to wait and see if she’s really as formidable as Abé says.

Some characters did receive vital tweaks based off this kind of feedback, though. "John Mercury was very powerful in the beginning," Abé remembers, "and then all the other characters got more powerful, so he was then lacking something and we had to rebalance them. Another was Gaëlle Le Bris, the cannoness. She felt very weak for some players. She didn’t have a melee attack, as she’s more like a support character. She works super well with the team, so we actually changed the most on her tutorial."

Most tutorials in the game take place after you resurrect your latest crew member. Before you take them into battle, you’re given the option to get to grips with their new skillset in the TARDIS-like bowels of your ship, the Red Marley. Every one I tried during my preview only had that particular character present, but Abé says they needed one more for Gaëlle’s "to make players aware of more powerful playstyles".


Ignacia is the big bad of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, and you'll be tracking her movements and stealing her closely guarded treasures all across the Lost Caribbean.

As our chat draws to a close, Abé says that Shadow Gambit “definitely feels like the biggest leap” the studio’s taken so far. The alterations they’ve made may “change the core of the game a bit, but I think it’s in a very positive way,” he says. “Now it’s more like a dynamic challenge box, whereas before it was a lot more like a puzzle box game."

Does this mean Mimimi will continue making open-ended stealth strategy games going forward? That remains to be seen, Abé says. "To be honest, it's something that we're really looking for feedback on. I personally would like to stick with that, but you learn a lot as well. For example, the next game might have a more linear structure, but it could also have more openness than we did before because now we're confident with it." He also doesn't rule out returning to a more realistic setting after Shadow Gambit either, although what that might be is anyone's guess right now. Personally, I've very much enjoyed diving into this strange new world of Mimimi's so far, and I hope we get to splash about here a little while longer before lifting anchor and coming back to reality.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew arrives on Steam and the Epic Games Store on August 17th.