The ship’s cook slowly approached the Inquisition checkpoint. He whistled from around the corner, drawing one guard away from his post while my navigator teleported through the wall to kill the other one. As the remaining Inquisitor neared the bush where the rest of my crew was hiding, my ghostly spy possessed him. The spy, now a supernatural Agent 47 wearing the guard’s body as a disguise, returned to the checkpoint and waited, sabotaging a suspended crate to crush the approaching Inquisition leader, leaving the rest of my squad free to rescue the final Cursed crewmate and make our escape. Imagine many more moments like that and you’ll have a good idea of what it was like to preview Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew.
Shadow Gambit is an isometric, squad-based stealth strategy game, populated by a diverse, bizarre cast of idiosyncratic supernatural pirates. And based on what I’ve played thus far, it’s shaping up to be a fantastic time. It deftly balanced both fairly open-ended levels and tightly crafted encounter design, it gave me all the tools, the characters, and the room to do things my way, and it let me come up with fun, creative solutions as I stole my way through the Lost Caribbean.
Taking place in an alternate-history during the Golden Age of Piracy, I explored a fictional archipelago called The Timeless Shores. In this version of Earth, soul energy suffuses the world, and a Curse keeps the dead alive, granting them bizarre and varied supernatural abilities. The Cursed are powerful, but few in number, and they are being hunted down by the Inquisition, a group of religious zealots who serve a powerful being called “The Maiden.” She blesses the Inquisition with something called The Maiden’s Fire, allowing them to destroy Cursed individuals and objects, and even granting elite Inquisition members with supernatural abilities the player has to contend with during missions.
If you’ve played other top-down strategy games, the gameplay of Shadow Gambit may be familiar to you, but there are lots of little wrinkles that brought it to life for me. Between the mystical pirate setting, having ‘perfect information,’ the wide range of special abilities, having multiple different ways to tackle each level, and granular difficulty options; there is a lot to love. The art direction, music, and atmosphere are also evocative, and most dialogue is voiced (in an exaggerated manner very appropriate for a setting like this), which was a nice surprise.
Each member of the titular Cursed crew has different abilities, and it was easy to craft a three-person team that felt very “me” as I searched for hidden pirate treasure. Afia has a short-range teleport attack and can freeze enemies in time for a few seconds. Suleidy, the ship’s doctor (and a dryad) can throw spores at enemies to cause them to walk away from their posts or even cause a bush to instantly grow anywhere, creating new hiding spots. Pinkus the ghostly spy can possess enemies, letting him move freely behind enemy lines, and these are just three of the eight total crewmates in Shadow Gambit. Teresa, the silent sniper. Toya, the teleporting cook. The list goes on.
It was easy and fun to try different combinations of characters to lean into whatever I thought might work in the moment.
Each character brought an interesting spread of strategic abilities to the table and represented a different region of this fictionalized world, so it was easy and fun to try different combinations of characters to lean into whatever I thought might work in the moment. Combining those abilities to create powerful strategic situations, and systematically picking apart the Inquisition’s defense was the most fun I had during my time, and it’s the thing I can’t wait to get back to when the full game is released.
My team’s powers are far from the only engaging aspect or interesting point of articulation in Shadow Gambit. Detailed mission areas, which feature several possible starting points, multiple ways in and out of most areas, unique traversal options available to different crewmates, and interactable elements of the environment (enemy corpses, climbing vines, waterways, torches, crates, boulders, etc.) combined to make Shadow Gambit feel more immersive, sparking my creativity and letting me play my way.
Another great aspect of Shadow Gambit is how easy it makes iteration. When a plan works, it feels fantastic, but even when it doesn’t, it can be lots of fun. I found myself laughing when my “perfect” plan fell apart instantly (and I was swarmed by guards) due to several variables I hadn’t accounted for, which is always a great sign for me, as I get frustrated when I feel a game isn’t respecting my time. Even when I screwed up, two quick button presses and I was thrown back to my last quicksave, ready to take out those pesky patrolling guards I hadn’t seen before.
Mimimi, the developers (and publishers) of Shadow Gambit, are also responsible for Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, and Desperados III, so I’m expecting the high degree of quality I’ve enjoyed in the preview to carry through to the full release. Shadow Gambit will reportedly take 25 hours to beat, and I had access to the approximately 6 hours which comprise its first act, which gave me a nice spread of missions with different goals, enemies, crew members and mission lengths.
Between solid quality of life options, granular difficulty, a fun setting, and lots of weird abilities to experiment with through thoughtfully-crafted areas, Shadow Gambit is now one of my most anticipated games of 2023 (a crazy thing given how crowded the gaming landscape is about to be).
Continue reading...
Shadow Gambit is an isometric, squad-based stealth strategy game, populated by a diverse, bizarre cast of idiosyncratic supernatural pirates. And based on what I’ve played thus far, it’s shaping up to be a fantastic time. It deftly balanced both fairly open-ended levels and tightly crafted encounter design, it gave me all the tools, the characters, and the room to do things my way, and it let me come up with fun, creative solutions as I stole my way through the Lost Caribbean.
Taking place in an alternate-history during the Golden Age of Piracy, I explored a fictional archipelago called The Timeless Shores. In this version of Earth, soul energy suffuses the world, and a Curse keeps the dead alive, granting them bizarre and varied supernatural abilities. The Cursed are powerful, but few in number, and they are being hunted down by the Inquisition, a group of religious zealots who serve a powerful being called “The Maiden.” She blesses the Inquisition with something called The Maiden’s Fire, allowing them to destroy Cursed individuals and objects, and even granting elite Inquisition members with supernatural abilities the player has to contend with during missions.
If you’ve played other top-down strategy games, the gameplay of Shadow Gambit may be familiar to you, but there are lots of little wrinkles that brought it to life for me. Between the mystical pirate setting, having ‘perfect information,’ the wide range of special abilities, having multiple different ways to tackle each level, and granular difficulty options; there is a lot to love. The art direction, music, and atmosphere are also evocative, and most dialogue is voiced (in an exaggerated manner very appropriate for a setting like this), which was a nice surprise.
Each member of the titular Cursed crew has different abilities, and it was easy to craft a three-person team that felt very “me” as I searched for hidden pirate treasure. Afia has a short-range teleport attack and can freeze enemies in time for a few seconds. Suleidy, the ship’s doctor (and a dryad) can throw spores at enemies to cause them to walk away from their posts or even cause a bush to instantly grow anywhere, creating new hiding spots. Pinkus the ghostly spy can possess enemies, letting him move freely behind enemy lines, and these are just three of the eight total crewmates in Shadow Gambit. Teresa, the silent sniper. Toya, the teleporting cook. The list goes on.
It was easy and fun to try different combinations of characters to lean into whatever I thought might work in the moment.
Each character brought an interesting spread of strategic abilities to the table and represented a different region of this fictionalized world, so it was easy and fun to try different combinations of characters to lean into whatever I thought might work in the moment. Combining those abilities to create powerful strategic situations, and systematically picking apart the Inquisition’s defense was the most fun I had during my time, and it’s the thing I can’t wait to get back to when the full game is released.
My team’s powers are far from the only engaging aspect or interesting point of articulation in Shadow Gambit. Detailed mission areas, which feature several possible starting points, multiple ways in and out of most areas, unique traversal options available to different crewmates, and interactable elements of the environment (enemy corpses, climbing vines, waterways, torches, crates, boulders, etc.) combined to make Shadow Gambit feel more immersive, sparking my creativity and letting me play my way.
Another great aspect of Shadow Gambit is how easy it makes iteration. When a plan works, it feels fantastic, but even when it doesn’t, it can be lots of fun. I found myself laughing when my “perfect” plan fell apart instantly (and I was swarmed by guards) due to several variables I hadn’t accounted for, which is always a great sign for me, as I get frustrated when I feel a game isn’t respecting my time. Even when I screwed up, two quick button presses and I was thrown back to my last quicksave, ready to take out those pesky patrolling guards I hadn’t seen before.
Mimimi, the developers (and publishers) of Shadow Gambit, are also responsible for Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, and Desperados III, so I’m expecting the high degree of quality I’ve enjoyed in the preview to carry through to the full release. Shadow Gambit will reportedly take 25 hours to beat, and I had access to the approximately 6 hours which comprise its first act, which gave me a nice spread of missions with different goals, enemies, crew members and mission lengths.
Between solid quality of life options, granular difficulty, a fun setting, and lots of weird abilities to experiment with through thoughtfully-crafted areas, Shadow Gambit is now one of my most anticipated games of 2023 (a crazy thing given how crowded the gaming landscape is about to be).
Continue reading...
