Title Info
Released: August 17, 2023
Publisher: Mimimi Games GmbH
Developer: Mimimi Games GmbH
Platforms: PS5, PC (Reviewed), Series X/S
Price: $39.99
Copy purchased
Spoilers for the score at the bottom of this review: Shadow Gambit is nothing short of a creative triumph. It’s a masterclass of game design so thoroughly well considered that I pity any other title that attempts this genre. As a stealth game, as a tactics game, as just a video game in general; Shadow Gambit sets a standard that many would aspire to, but few could actually achieve. I have several thousand more words explaining why but I wanted you to understand as soon as possible, that Shadow Gambit is one of the best games of the year. It’s probably one of the best games ever made.
The Cursed Crew is the third stealth tactics game from German development studio Mimimi Games. It follows 2016’s brilliant Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and 2020’s equally brilliant Desperados III. While none of these titles are narratively connected, there is a clear gameplay through-line that links them together. Desperados III builds on the foundation that Shadow Tactics established, while Shadow Gambit refines and expands far beyond what its older siblings could even imagine. I bring those two earlier games up because you should definitely play them as well, they are fantastic. I’m going to stop meandering and focus on Shadow Gambit now.
The actual start of the review…
Shadow Gambit begins with the arrival of Afia Manicato, a Cursed (magic zombie) that has washed up in the Timeless Shores searching for the legendary pirate ship known as the Red Marley. She enlists the help of an extremely dapper skeleton who uses his magic to teleport her to the Marley’s last known location. After some tutorial shenanigans, Afia discovers that the Red Marley is currently under siege by the Inquisition: fire worshipping buzzkills devoted to geometric purity and their mysterious holy Maiden. The Inquisition hates Cursed, the color green, and pirates above all else. What terrible luck that the Red Marley happens to be a Cursed green pirate ship. However, it’s nothing that Afia can’t solve through the clever application of some localized stabbing. Upon reaching the Marley, Afia strikes a bargain with the ship. Its freedom, in exchange for a place on the crew and two shares of the former captain’s treasure.
Once you complete the tutorial mission, you are tasked with reviving the slain members of the crew. Each revival will cost you a precious Black Pearl, as well as a heaping tablespoon of Soul Energy. The Marley is kind enough to provide you with both components for the first resurrection. There are seven crew members that you’ll acquire throughout the campaign and you choose the order in which they are brought back; except for this first one. You do still get to make a choice but are limited to one of two beginner friendly assassins. The one armed ship cook named Toya, or the ship doctor Suleidy. I personally went with Toya because my brain didn’t register anything else after “skeleton samurai.”
Reviving a crew member leads to a metal cutscene where Afia blasts their eldritch corpse with a Black Pearl loaded into her flintlock. They’ll deliver some banter about how much being dead sucked before the Marley directs them into her hold for character specific lessons in the Training Deck. All training missions are completely optional but I highly encourage you to play them all regardless. Powers that seem straightforward may have applications you won’t normally consider until locked in a room with no other tools at your disposal. With your party size doubled, it’s time to sail the cursed high seas to track down more Black Pearls and Soul Energy.
Gameplay polished to a shine…
Shadow Gambit’s structure is mission based. You’ll choose the island you wish to visit, pick the mission you want to play, select your landing spot, and finally decide which crew members you’re bringing to the party. Some missions will have crew requirements, Afia is mandatory for most early deployments, but everything is largely at your discretion. You can pick a risky landing point near the objective for a faster mission time, or something further away with terrain that can be more easily navigated and whose guard patrols are fewer and farther between. Perhaps your objective is at the top of a tower surrounded by snipers. You could sprint your way through their sight lines, execute them from across the map with your Sharpshooter, or launch a unit to the top of the tower from a cannon. (Being shot out of a canon won’t kill your units, they’re already dead after all) The objectives themselves run the gamut from humble eavesdropping to assassination; and even cooking a Lovecraftian stew so delicious that it calls the soul of a long dead pirate back from Hell. That last one is certainly a highlight of my time with the game.
No matter which mission you select, each one is going to vary wildly depending on the crew that you’ve assembled. With all 8 characters being so useful and fun, I spent a great deal of time agonizing over who to bring. Since I want to talk about all of them, here’s an internet friendly bulleted list with everyone’s information:
- Afia Manicato (Navigator) – Mastery over space and time. Can teleport and freeze enemies from a distance.
- Toya of Iga (Ship Cook) – Samurai of spice and seasoning. Able to distract guards over a wide area with his flute and warp to the last location of his Katashiro.
- Gaelle le Bris (Cannoness) – Ultimate party starter. She can load unconscious/dead guards, or fellow crewmates, into her cannon and shoot them at other people. It’s so funny and I can’t stop doing it.
- Quentin Aalbers (Treasure Hunter) – Pickpocket extraordinaire. His fishing line can interact with objects from a distance or pull allies to his location for a quick extraction.
- Teresa la Ciega (Sharpshooter) – An Inquisition exile who fires an arrow made of her own charred soul to kill from a massive distance.
- Suleidy (Ship Doctor) – Ironically the most lethal member of the crew. Suleidy can create blind spots, send enemies away from their posts, and instantly dispose of multiple corpses.
- John Mercury (Shipwright) – Everyone else uses knives, John uses an anchor. Using his connection to the Depths, John can bypass any walls or barricades in a limited range.
- Pinkus van Presswald (Quartermaster) – This infuriating old bastard can possess enemy units by blowing smoke in their faces. Able to move around freely and distract any sentries blocking the rest of your party.
The greatest magic trick of Shadow Gambit is how every party composition is a viable choice for any encounter. There are situations where a particular skill might be the most useful, but your progress is never gated behind them. Whether you’re a strategic master that likes to keep things clinical with a well balanced team, or a card carrying agent of chaos that always clicks Random on crew select, your creativity is what will ultimately lead you to success. With our merry band of cutthroats selected, the tactical stealth action can begin.
The gameplay in Shadow Gambit is real-time strategy with pause, however it is very micro intensive. You control 1-8 units depending on the mission and each unit can only queue a single command at a time. Since this is a stealth game, your team is also very fragile. Enemies react quickly, have perfect aim, and very long viewcones so reckless engagements will see you overwhelmed in short order. You can revive a downed crew member if you get to their body fast enough, but taking too long means you have to extract their corpse and must continue the mission without them. No matter how badly things are going, or what unintended effect your strategy had, there’s an ace up your sleeve at all times. The Red Marley and her ability to capture memories.
As you progress through the campaign, you will become intimately familiar with your F5 and F8 keys. The former will create a memory, the Marley will store the three most recent, and the latter will unleash it. The discerning reader may have noticed that I’m just using fun in-universe substitutes for quicksave and quickload. I know there has been a great deal of discourse lately about how reloading saves undermines the game experience in some way, but it is very much how you are meant to play Shadow Gambit. The Marley will even make comments about how she’s here to help if it’s been a long time since your last save. (The interval at which she reminds you can be adjusted in the settings or turned off entirely) You have so many tools at your disposal and enemy placement/patrol routes are frequently very devious. It can sometimes feel like the game is asking you to do the impossible so being able to instantly reset your engagement is critical. You can experiment without consequence and this leads to some of the most satisfying moments as your failures blossom into a beautifully constructed strategy.
The final piece of the puzzle for those elegant strategies is Shadow Mode. This feature is present in all Mimimi titles and it is never not awesome. Shadow Mode allows you to pause time and issue orders to your entire squad which will be carried out simultaneously once you hit Enter. This could be something as simple as having each crew member emerge from hiding to assassinate a nearby target; to having Toya pull an enemy patrol beneath a boulder while Quentin yanks him to safety as Afia teleports into position to crush the red shirts Loony Toons style. The only limit is what you can come up with. This sounds overpowered on paper, as do most crew abilities, but these devs are without equal when it comes to game balance. The key limitation of Shadow Mode is that the actions happen in real-time. If someone is too far away to perform the order you assigned, then they have to travel across the map until they are close enough. This can lead to a meticulous plan coming a part at the seams as an enemy can react fast enough to sound the alarm, swarming the area with Acolytes. Be glad you pressed F5 before executing Shadow Mode. You did press F5, right?
Tightrope walking never looked so easy…
It really cannot be overstated exactly how well balanced every part of this game is. In addition to constant threat of being seen, almost any action other than crouch walking produces sound. Trying to take out the straggler of a patrol? Well he’s going to make noise and his homies are going to turn around and shoot you. Want to launch and ally to the top of a vantage point? Better make sure the coast is clear so no one comes to investigate the sound of a cannon being fired. My personal favorite act of game balance comes in the form of flintlock pistols; being pirates, every member of the crew has one with a single bullet at the start of each mission. If there’s an enemy just out of reach, the pistol can solve the problem for you. However, it may create additional issues because firing a flintlock is the loudest action in the game. It can actually be heard from further away that it can be fired, so enemies outside of your range are able to detect you. The player is provided with a powerful solution, but the drawbacks are severe enough to encourage a different approach. I love this design decision so much because firearms were definitely too strong in the previous Shadow Tactics.
After each successful mission, you’ll return to the haunted planks of the Red Marley where you can spend time with you’re cursed coworkers. They may have some additional banter to share with Afia but the main attractions are their individual Crew Tales. Each character has an episodic storyline that takes place outside of the main campaign where you get to experience their role on the ship. Gaelle, for instance, is in charge of maintaining the Marley’s cannons and directing the literal skeleton crew in their upkeep. Unfortunately, some of the lost souls put to work on the Marley aren’t able to find the joy in un-living anymore. That means it’s up to Gaelle to raise their spirits, by shooting them into the ocean and teaching them how to recite poetry. You know, regular cannoness stuff. It might sound very silly but I grew to love all the members of my crew. In the 30 hours I spent with them on this adventure, I feel a deeper kinship with them than in games with smaller parties and double the length. Part of that is down to the quality of the writing, the crew has tremendous chemistry with one another, and the other part is the fantastic voice acting.
The story is something that Mimimi could have treated as a low priority with how much work went into the actual gameplay, but Shadow Gambit contains a substantial number of dialogue scenes and background lore. None of it feels tacked on as an afterthought and all of it is voice acted. A tale of those who would choose freedom and adventure in bold defiance of the unknown against totalitarians that offer safety and surety in exchange for unquestioning obedience isn’t new, but it’s something I always enjoy. I would be remiss to not give special attention to the villain Ignacia. She’s a great opposing force and her presence is felt at all times as she hounds the Red Marley with boiling fanaticism. You can really feel how much disgust she harbors for reality’s inherent disorder. A disorder that she and her Inquisition will stop at nothing to stamp out to make the world as perfect as the geometric fire that burns their souls. It’s a world that I would love to revisit and see explored further. Sadly, all great adventures must come to an end.
Sailing into that beautiful horizon…
On August 29th, a mere 12 days after the launch of Shadow Gambit, it was announced that this would be Mimimi’s final game. After 15 years and three critically successful releases, the founders revealed it was time to prioritize their personal lives and families instead of starting another multi-year production cycle. Before the announcement, I had been wondering how they could possibly improve their games any further given that Shadow Gambit is immaculate. To throw some wild conjecture around: I think they likely had ideas, but implementing them would take more time and money than the studio would ever be able to amass. Rather than spending years and millions on a potential compromise, they decided to go out with an unmitigated win.
Let there be no mistake, that’s exactly what Shadow Gambit is: a win, on every level. This is a title so laser focused in it’s design that every interaction feels intentional. There are no fluff mechanics to pad the time and every tool in your arsenal is there for a reason and balanced accordingly. It’s a culmination of everything the developers learned in their previous two outings: distilled, refined, and expanded. I cannot recommend it enough.