For their last two major releases, German-based development studio Mimimi Games have refined their approach to top-down stealth tactics, where you command small squads of colorful characters through heavily guarded outposts. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun unfolded in feudal Japan, and Desperados III was a western. Mimimi’s latest, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, transplants the studio’s winning formula to a ghostly version of the Golden Age of Piracy, where undead called the Cursed roam the high seas.
As Afia Manicato, an ambitious pirate who sheathes her sword through the hole in her chest, you board a now-captainless pirate ship called the Red Marley and reassemble its infamous undead crew, following clues to the former captain’s mysterious treasure while running afoul of religious zealots called the Inquisition of the Burning Maiden. The resulting tone is even more fantastical and cartoonish than that of Mimimi’s previous games, suggesting Pirates of the Caribbean mashed up with the big personalities and individual superpowers of One Piece.
From appearance to abilities, each character is distinct. Afia can teleport across short distances, Dishonored-style, while the ghostly Pinkus relies on possessing the bodies of Inquisition acolytes to walk behind enemy lines. Elsewhere, muscular gunner Gaelle can load the bodies of friend and foe alike into her cannon and shoot them over obstacles, while John Mercury uses his anchor to burrow into a ghostly belowground void and then re-emerge elsewhere.
The Cursed Crew’s most important character, though, is the spirit of the Red Marley herself, whose abilities allow her to capture moments of time “memories” and rewind to them at will. Essentially, it’s an in-universe representation of the save/reload process that’s a staple of the genre and of Mimimi’s games in particular. The developer’s previous titles featured on-screen timers noting how long ago you last saved, and The Cursed Crew now features the Red Marley chiming in with a vocal reminder as an ethereal bell pops in and out of existence.
The game differs most from its predecessors in its more open-ended sense of progression. After an initial choice between two characters, Afia may resurrect the remaining six members of the Red Marley crew in any order. To perform a resurrection, you choose missions across the available island levels, which have multiple entry points as well as multiple exits. It takes most of the campaign to get the whole band back together, and in the meantime the game incentivizes variety by giving boosts toward upgrades when you mix up your three-pirate squad.
Though it shares some its more satisfying qualities with its predecessors, The Cursed Crew’s concessions toward a more “modern” sense of progression aren’t always for the better. The linear progress of Mimimi’s prior games meant that levels could be tailored for specific abilities, creating a series of stealth puzzles to test your knowledge of the available characters. Now, in accommodating so many different character combinations, the levels lose some of that clarity of purpose, particularly when you assemble a squad that isn’t well-suited for the given mission.
These games are at their best when they force you to orchestrate an elaborate plan using a wide range of techniques, but sometimes you’re stuck abusing the ability to lure guards to other positions. Sometimes you’ll even earn one of the hidden achievement badges for not using certain characters, which feels like a consolation prize for blundering into hard mode.
Compounding the issue is that it can be a bit of a strain to come up with eight characters who must each have different, upgradeable powers. The personalities remain strong, but some units are weak links until you complete the glacial process of upgrading their abilities. If anything, The Cursed Crew works more like an argument against some common game design “wisdom,” because simply carrying out a successful plan is far more satisfying than filling up a progress bar to earn tactical options that could have been available by default. The openness of the levels, too, feels more like an obligatory quota than a meaningful advancement in design since at least half of the potential entry and exit points for any mission are too out-of-the-way to bother using.
But the non-linear nature of The Cursed Crew does have its virtues. There are some magnificent moments of discovery where you feel as though you’ve circumvented the level design by maneuvering the right character into the right position to bypass certain guard setups or parts of the terrain. Simply by spending so much time with the characters, you’ll hit upon certain combinations of abilities independently, fine-tuning new strategies all the way up to the end. It’s in these moments that you see what the developers are aiming for, and they suggest that The Cursed Crew could be a tentative step in an exciting new direction for the studio, even if those elements are more notable for how they might be refined in a subsequent release.
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