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

Child of Malkav

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Good. Fuck realism and movie games. Games are meant to be fun. Go play TLOU and RDR 2 and other shit like that if you want muh graphix and animations and horse balls shrinking during the cold. Keep that schizo shit out of videogames.
 

Lemming42

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It's good to hear they're keenly aware of the advantages and drawbacks to the open-ended re-visitable levels, and that there'll be some more traditional Desperados-style missions later on.

From what I've played of the demo I think I definitely ultimately prefer the more linear (or "bespoke", to quote the article) Desperados approach but it's fantastic that they're willing to experiment with their formula and try out different kinds of mechanics and design philosophies in different games to see what's possible and to make each game feel distinct from the others.
 

Jinn

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From playing the demo, I was actually very happy with the more free-form style being presented. Unlocking different crew members as a type of slight choice and consequence, along with the idea of skill progression through gaining completed mission points and mission selection particularly made me happy. I know that a lot of people enjoy the more puzzly side of this genre and the restrictions that come with it, but having more freedom to approach different situations is what emphasizes the "tactics" part of the genre for me. This game is emphasizing the later, and I have to say I prefer it.

Besides all that, clearly another passion project for the studio. You can feel the love and fun put into every piece of it.
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I was sad to read that they shied away so much from "blowing up bridges", i.e. variating on the landscape in later visits to the same level. Environments that change drastically over time aren't used enough in games. But that is a minor disappointment in what looks like another rock solid game from Mimimi.
 

Child of Malkav

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I was sad to read that they shied away so much from "blowing up bridges", i.e. variating on the landscape in later visits to the same level. Environments that change drastically over time aren't used enough in games.
That's why I like XCOM 2 so much, you can make your own paths through a level and can get very creative. Destructible environment needs to be a thing in more and more games.
 

ERYFKRAD

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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I was sad to read that they shied away so much from "blowing up bridges", i.e. variating on the landscape in later visits to the same level. Environments that change drastically over time aren't used enough in games.
That's why I like XCOM 2 so much, you can make your own paths through a level and can get very creative. Destructible environment needs to be a thing in more and more games.
More games ought to be about interactions between systems rather than executions of scripts.
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Releasing in one week at $39.99 -10% launch discount. It's weird having so many "top of my list" games all at the same time.
 

Elthosian

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Good. Fuck realism and movie games. Games are meant to be fun. Go play TLOU and RDR 2 and other shit like that if you want muh graphix and animations and horse balls shrinking during the cold. Keep that schizo shit out of videogames.
Fuck all these graphicswhores, hellriders of decline.
 

Elthosian

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Mar 14, 2012
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I was sad to read that they shied away so much from "blowing up bridges", i.e. variating on the landscape in later visits to the same level. Environments that change drastically over time aren't used enough in games.
That's why I like XCOM 2 so much, you can make your own paths through a level and can get very creative. Destructible environment needs to be a thing in more and more games.
More games ought to be about interactions between systems rather than executions of scripts.
Good man, have you heard of our lord Rain World per chance?
 

Lemming42

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Burned out on BG3 and there's still a week to go until this, the next BIG RELEASE on my list. Come on Mimimi you pricks just release it now. Wtf am I meant to do for the next week.
 

Morgoth

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Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew review - old-school stealth gets a rip-roaring pirate upgrade


Alone in the darrrrghk.

An illustration showing all eight members of the Red Marley's undead crew gathered together in a heroic pose. Fearless female pirate Afia Manicat stands front and centre, glowing spectral sword in hand. Image credit: Mimimi Games

Matt Wales avatar


Review by Matt Wales News Reporter

Published on 16 Aug 2023

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a cerebral but hugely characterful stealth tactics game filled with creativity and depth. And fun pirate stuff.
Let us speak of the bong; if death is inevitable in Shadow Gambit, then so too is the tremulous peel of the Red Marley's phantom bell. With the press of a button, it chimes across the ethereal plane, solidifying a moment into a memory, and with another button, the past becomes present as the memory is restored: in an instance, lessons are learned, mistakes are undone, the slate is wiped clean to try, try again.

Shadow Tactics: The Cursed Crew review​

It's a temporal dance that'll be immediately familiar to those who've played developer Mimimi's previous games. With the likes of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, the studio has carved a wonderfully specific niche for itself over the years, creating top-down squad-based stealth-tactics games very much inspired by genre classics like Commandos and Desperados - where margin for error is minimal and save scumming is elevated to high art. That one-two of quick-save and quick-load - here represented by Red Marley's thunderous bong - might be familiar, but in Shadow Gambit it also feels different somehow. Its bong is so profoundly, theatrically woven into the fabric of its story, so brazenly part of its identity - crashing in amid swirling green mists at one end, smashing violently out of shattering glass at the other - it becomes a mechanic proudly, confidently made motif, and goodness, is Shadow Gambit assured.
That starts with the setting; while Mimimi’s earlier games played it relatively straight in terms of historical realism, Shadow Gambit presents a wonderfully realised alternative vision of the golden age of piracy, where cursed undead crews roam the seas battling an order of religious fanatics known as the Inquisition. At the centre of it all is Afia Manicat, an ambitious undead pirate with a plan in her head, a conveniently accessible cutlass through her heart, and, after a confidently swashbuckling opening, an invitation to join the crew of the Red Marley, a sentient ship currently on the hunt for its former captain’s legendary treasure.
Here's Shadow Gambit's release date trailer to show it in action.
It's gloriously characterful stuff, a full-blooded high seas adventure full of magic, camaraderie, and danger. Grog is glugged, buckles are swashed, and timbers are shivered, but Mimimi infuses proceedings with its own darkly fantastical vision. This is a world of sentient jungles, islands perpetually frozen at the point of destruction, ethereal dimensions of shattered memories and, during character-specific interludes that play out between missions on the Red Marley, murder plots - and even fish looking to be tutored in the ways of the samurai.

But for all its pirate trimmings, Shadow Gambit remains steadfastly in the tradition of Mimimi's earlier titles, thrusting players deep into enemy-infested territory for a ceaseless game of dodge the sight cone. You've got a starting point, an end point, and a billion enemies in-between. The what, then, is easy - slip quietly from one to the other without raising the alarm - but the how is another matter entirely, and the tactical heart of the game.
Yes, you'll spend an awful lot of time patiently crouching in bushes as you scour your surroundings, searching out pathways and potential openings, memorising patrols, but then comes the really fun bit: the thrill of freewheeling experimentation as you rapidly cobble together a plan, manoeuvre your squad mates into a position and (all being well) unleash your full tactical might, clearing the route forward in a silent dance of synchronous destruction. It's a game, like its predecessors, built around constant repetitions of escalating tension and climactic release, but here it's brought to life with irresistible piratical swagger. Aesthetically, it's a hoot - beautifully presented, wonderfully voiced, sharply written - but more than that, Shadow Gambit's world unshackling itself from reality gives Mimimi licence to take its familiar stealth-tactics formula into uncharted realms, and it embraces that fantastical potential at every turn.
That manifests most acutely in Shadow Gambit's supernaturally imbued crew. Each of its eight playable characters might be constructed from a relatively slender set of mechanical archetypes - position changers, body hiders, infiltrators, and so on - but the imaginative ways Mimimi plays within those fixed boundaries to build out a distinctive set of signature skills is never less than thrilling. Afia can maim-dash from extended distances or freeze enemies in time; eyeless Spanish sniper Teresa la Ciega can temporarily blind or murder from afar, using a bullet fashioned from her very soul. There's Toya of Iga, a skeletal samurai cook whose paper teleportation charms and whistle create a fascinatingly intricate combination of dovetailing abilities, enabling players to lure enemies to a specific spot then teleport into a now-vacated space or on top of them for a quick kill. There's Pinkus, a stuffy baron who can possess enemies and walk around encampments undisturbed; John, a sodden shipwright with a friendly undead fish chum, can move around beneath the ground, dragging unsuspecting enemies to their doom - and on it goes.
It all adds up to a diverse tactical toolkit that remains a joy to use throughout, with ample room for ad hoc synergies, flashes of sudden inspiration, and moments of 'OH BUT WHAT IF…' As Toya frequently says, "Our options for variety are endless". But while these abilities are often thrilling - a supernatural skillset that provides the perfect flashy counterpoint to those inevitable moments of quietly strategic contemplation - just as exciting are the carefully considered limitations each unit must operate within. Teresa la Ciega's single bullet must always be retrieved before it can be used again; Pinkus' possession ability only works within a fixed radius from the point of entry; Toya's whistle lure has a perilously large area of effect meaning reckless use is unwise. There are even restrictions on who can swim and climb vines, creating often unpredictable environmental roadblocks that demand creative strategic rethinks on the fly.

Shadow Gambit is a game that knows how to make choices interesting and, duly, one that never fails to give you interesting choices to make. Even before missions, there are questions to be answered, starting with: Where do you want to go? Often, you've several possible islands to visit, each with multiple objectives set across different locations and varying times of day. Then you're asked, which three crew mates will you take into a mission? That's a lot of potential synergies to consider before you even reach your destination, and when you do, there's another choice: where on the island do you land? Do you plot a course through the quickest route to your objective, or the safest? And stages, too, are often vast, intricate things to parse and process, looping up cliffs, down into valleys, criss-crossing back and forth over bridges, into alleyways - each diverging path another tactical option available to you.
There's a lot to consider, then, but crucially Mimimi also knows when to rein those choices in. For all its flashy action pizazz, Shadow Gambit remains a slow-paced, sometimes intensely cerebral game, but it's also one that's patient and welcoming to a fault, eager to ease entry so everyone can join in the fun. There’s the foregrounding of that bong, for instance, a persistent reminder that failure isn't a punishment but a fresh opportunity to try something new. Then there's the unexpectedly slow drip-feed of new crewmates throughout the story campaign; you can choose who to resurrect along the way, but you won't gain access to the full roster until late on, just before the post-game, meaning you've little choice but to embrace the nuances of each, ultimately encouraging a much richer, better informed style of play.

It's just one of several tricks Mimimi uses to nudge players away from bad habits and self-limiting behaviours; impenetrable clusters of enemies encourage players over-reliant on particular crew members to think in terms of unified assaults, while other enemies, magically connected across long distances so that they must be felled in unison, often require team mates to take significantly diverging paths, forcing their individual strengths to the fore. There's even an upgrade system foundationally built around unused characters; each time a crew mate sits out a mission, they'll provide a massive XP boost next time around, strongly incentivising those characters to be brought into play. It's clever stuff, subtly, elegantly making a sometimes impenetrable genre eminently more approachable.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew accessibility options​

Colourblind mode; individual subtitle settings for NPCs, players, briefings, cutscenes, and conversations; custom keybinding; controller support.
There's so much confident refinement here that it's perhaps a little surprising to see Shadow Gambit's occasional failure to grapple with some of the more fundamental failings of its staunchly old-school genre core. Objectives, for instance, remain curiously, unwaveringly unambitious, which, for all the richness of its wonderful toolkit, can make the inherent micro-loops of its slow-paced stealth wearying at times. It's hard, too, to fully embrace its lingering attachment to the archaic abstraction of swaying sight cones. When you can stand an inch to the side of an enemy without being seen, or take a single step back to become functionally invisible, the tactical illusion collapses and Shadow Gambit gets perilously, unsatisfactorily close to becoming a game of mechanical exploitation.
These are rare moments, though, and, for the bulk of its lengthy run-time - expanded through post-game objectives designed to encourage further experimentation - Shadow Gambit is a treat; a thrilling, supremely confident, and most of all thoughtful refinement of a formula that only occasionally lets its decades-old roots peek through. Raucous, high seas adventure and cerebral, slow-paced stealth mightn't seem like the most natural of bedfellows, but here, Mimimi's joyous mastery of a very particular form somehow makes the combination sing.

4/5
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Oh, I like that thing about xp bonuses for using crewmembers that have been sitting on the bench. Nice little incentive to not boringly use your one "dream team" over and over. Some other really nice design choices here too to break you out of degenerate playstyles.

Matt Wales/Eurogamer said:
It's just one of several tricks Mimimi uses to nudge players away from bad habits and self-limiting behaviours; impenetrable clusters of enemies encourage players over-reliant on particular crew members to think in terms of unified assaults, while other enemies, magically connected across long distances so that they must be felled in unison, often require team mates to take significantly diverging paths, forcing their individual strengths to the fore. There's even an upgrade system foundationally built around unused characters; each time a crew mate sits out a mission, they'll provide a massive XP boost next time around, strongly incentivising those characters to be brought into play. It's clever stuff, subtly, elegantly making a sometimes impenetrable genre eminently more approachable.
 
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Lemming42

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What the fuck! I tried to buy the game but got lost in inverse bizarro hell where the game was phasing in and out of existence on the Steam store. It was like when people's transporter patterns get lost in Star Trek.

I guess I was trying to buy it right as Steam updated it or something? Either way I expect to be billed for about £900.

Bodes well for the game.
 

Jinn

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Why'd this have to release right now? I've got way too much to play.

:negative:

Not going to be able to throw them my support right now, but I hope it's a successful launch for them. Loved the demo.
 

DemonKing

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Why'd this have to release right now? I've got way too much to play.

:negative:
Yep - I've already got JA3, BG3 and Quake 2 remaster on the boil (plus tons of other games I've yet to finish).

Strangely all of my favourites key sites are "Out of Stock" so it seems the only way to buy at the moment is directly through Steam or GOG.
 

Jinn

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Strangely all of my favourites key sites are "Out of Stock" so it seems the only way to buy at the moment is directly through Steam or GOG.
Ha! I was actually checking the price on Greenman just a little bit ago, saw it had a pretty nice sale going, said "fuck, I'll get it now and play it later," went to click that add to cart button, and found it said out of stock.
 

Lemming42

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The financial beatdown has been brutal lately. JA3, Aliens: Dark Descent, Diablo IV, BG3, En Garde!, Shadow Gambit. I bought Hades on sale as well. Gotten to the point of having to dip into my "Emergency Stash" (a bundle of about ten fivers I keep behind the wardrobe, a few of which I think are no longer legal tender).

All just getting ready for the bankruptcy-inducing £60 agony of Shitfield.

This game is great btw, whenever you all get around to playing it. I still think it's a slight step down from Desperados 3 in terms of level design and, having cleared a couple of the islands, I don't really see the advantage of the non-linear approach - you can technically approach things from a number of angles, but in practice it ends up being exactly like the challenge-room design of D3 only with smaller and easier challenges. But the sheer inventiveness of the character abilities makes up for it, you can pull off the most insanely bullshit plans of the type you'd never be able to do in D3. The story actually seems quite interesting too so far. The ship is such a bastard, and I mean that in a good way.
 

Lemming42

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One thing that sucks is that you can end up essentially playing the same mission twice. I'm doing the second mission on an island called Iron Bay and, aside from it being daytime now while the original mission was night, I think this is the exact same mission I played earlier. Enemies in the same places with same patrols and everything. I could technically have picked another landing point to give myself a different first half to the mission, but the landing point I've chosen made the most sense on both missions.
 

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