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Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew review: an all-time treasureSolid gold
Solid gold
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mimimi Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mimimi Games
Winding back the clock to rewrite past mistakes is a core stratagem of any Mimimi game.Baldur’s Gate 3might have rekindled the debate about save-scumming over in RPG circles, but in the stealthstrategyarena where Mimimi operate, reaching for the F5 and F8 keys to quick load a previous save is as natural as swapping between your party members on 123, or activating their unique abilities to clobber all manner of unsuspecting guards on the back of the head with ASD and F.
In their latest real-time tactics-me-doShadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, however, the act of quick saving has been woven directly into the language of the game, presented not as cold, hard button commands, but as ‘captured memories’ that your magical ghost ship The Red Marley is able to unleash to make sure your supernatural pirate crew don’t get caught or die (again) on the job.
Functionally, quick-saving’s no different to how it was inDesperados 3orShadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun. If you haven’t quick-saved in a while, The Red Marley will literally ding a ghostly bell at the top of the screen reminding you of the march of time. But the small linguistic change is arguably Shadow Gambit’s greatest masterstroke, elevating it beyond even the incredible Desperados 3. I can’t tell you specifics - otherwise Mimimi might tie an anchor to my leg and chuck me into the depths of Davy Jones' locker - but nor would I want to, as this is the kind of mid-game reveal that should be experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. Just know that it’s the kind rug-pull that puts it in the same ‘Cor, yes, this is really very clever indeed and could only ever be done in a game’ camp as the likes ofInscryption, Zero Escape, Tunic andDoki Doki Literature Club.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mimimi Games
Taking out enemies requires careful timing and planning, and you’ll be doing a lot of crouching in bushes while you observe patrol patterns and figure out lines of sight. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mimimi Games
Shadow Gambit is like a cannonball to the chest (or stomach, if you’re Gaelle De Bris up in the header image), building on the studio’s already excellent stealth foundations with a tale of plot and plunder that strikes right at the heart of what memory is, as well as the devastating power it can hold over us. If the diegetic transformation around the nature of quick-saving hints at a studio grappling with its own legacy of mechanical artifice, then the second act of Shadow Gambit is ample proof that Mimimi have thoroughly mastered how interactive form and function can coexist to challenge us afresh. That they’ve also accomplished this while not only giving us their largest cast of would-be assassins yet, but also their most imaginative and unconventional mission structure so far, is nothing short of remarkable.
Unlike the linear, set-piece driven sorties of Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun, Shadow Gambit leans into its pirate fantasy with aplomb, giving you a crop of islands to explore and a mission log to tackle in (mostly) whatever order you like. You’ll revisit most of these islands four or five times over the course of the game, and after learning the ropes as the wily navigator (and definitely long-lost cousin ofDishonored’s Corvo and Emily Kaldwin) Afia Manicato, you’re given a welcome amount of freedom in how you shape your adventure. Your first order of business, for example, is reviving the rest of The Marley’s undead crew, who have all fallen foul of the tyrannical Inquisition, a religious order who’s taken it upon themselves to shake out every last cursed skeleton from the Timeless Shores' copious closets.
Ignacia makes for a wonderfully evil arch-nemesis in Shadow Gambit, and the 30-odd hours you’ll spend thinning her hordes of patrolling followers never fails to be delicious and devilish work. If you’ve played one of Mimimi’s games before, then the art of slipping through sight cones and noise radii to reach your objective will feel like pulling on an old comfortable shoe. Enemies might be spread across larger canvases this time, but their routines and well-covered look-out posts feel just as fiendishly constructed as they were in Desperados 3. Picking away at the cracks to lure stragglers into unseen corners with well-timed flute bursts, golden skulls, crackling sticks of dynamite and good old-fashioned coin tosses remains as thrilling and mentally stimulating as ever.
Left: Gaelle’s ability to fire friends and foes out of her cannon is great fun. Right: like Desperados 3, time freezes when you enter Shadow Mode to co-ordinate planned attacks (or just to give yourself some important breathing room in case of emergencies). |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mimimi Games
But Shadow Gambit’s greatest trick is how these larger play spaces feel new and different every time you visit. Sometimes a simple change in the time of day is enough to cast these spaces in a new light - literally, in the case of night time torches and campfires you’ll want to avoid, but the evening also brings in freshly-rotated guard clusters as well. Most missions, though, will draw you to specific sections of an island, meaning you could feasibly visit just, say, a third of it without having to interact with the rest in a single mission. Medal hunters will no doubt be tempted further afield, but keeping the action defined to small pockets makes this feel very much like Desperados 3’s carefully portioned-out social spaces and hostile zones, just writ large on an island - only here, everywhere is dangerous and there are no safe spaces.
There’s so much variety to be found here, too. For example, one of the later locations is a sandy islet littered with broken-up ships and a beautiful, half-exploded lighthouse standing on a hill in the centre. It’s as eye-cathing as any of Desperados 3’s big set pieces, but that’s not even the most interesting thing about it. Sure, one mission will see you visit that lighthouse to find the Black Pearl within it, but another will see you rescue an altogether more peculiar crew of pirates from a heavily guarded compound to the west - a moment of such delight that I can’t wait for you to see it for yourselves. Another will see you scale the carved-up hull of one of its shipwrecks to the east to fire a bunch of letters out of a cannon, while a further one still will see you chasing down a long lost pirate rival whose ghost keeps possessing different members of the Inquisition around the entire island. Now picture that kind of variety across half a dozen odd islands, and Shadow Gambit’s rinse-repeat tasks of ‘collect Black Pearl, collect Soul Energy, collect Relic’ become imbued with so much more than what you see on the mission screen.
It’s an impressive feat to have so many distinct areas feel like they belong in the same, cohesive space, but that’s merely the turn in Shadow Gambit’s wider magic display. The prestige is achieving exactly the same thing when you’ve also got the choice to pick which crew members to take with you. So many ‘approach things in any order!’ games end up feeling vanilla and generic when they’re designed to accommodate every possible player choice, but Shadow Gambit regularly served up tasty, truly one-size-fits all puzzle scenarios that I could really sink my teeth into - even when I actively chose the same island three times in a row to see if I could make it become boring. Taking a fresh trio of pirates forced me to think differently about familiar locations, and it kept each mission feeling fresh and exciting.
The Crew Tales sidestories are quite throwaway, but they’re all sweet little tales that are very charming and funny in their own way. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mimimi Games
