Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew Review

Bounding across a ship mast to cram yourself into a crew mate’s portable cannon, launching at a magical inquisitor, disrupting his ritual and then teleporting to a nearby bush to complete the infiltration of the cove. This is Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, a strategy game that involves stealthily manoeuvring a handpicked crew of three supernatural, reanimated pirates as they wrangle control of the curse of lost souls back from the dangerous inquisitors. All in service of returning to their grand ol’ piracy. 

From the get, this is a tough game. You’ll be mastering your raiding party of three purpose-built swashbucklers and embarking into non-linear island sandboxes to carry out objectives in whatever order you see fit. Despite the various difficulty settings allowing the player to drill down and configure player health points and various other modifiers, the core of this game remains unforgiving. Having characters that can do reality-morphing shit like opening a void and disappearing into it to avoid detection, the smallest of fumbles will bring gun-toting inquisitors upon your position in seconds. Health doesn’t typically regenerate during missions either, and right from the first outing, the player will be faced with the rapid, fatal response of alarmed, heavily armed foes. 

Your pirate crew is far better equipped for subterfuge than all-out assault. Most characters have a maximum of two bullets and often only a single offensive ability that goes into a devastating cooldown. The key to success is observing the patrol routes of your foes, identifying who has the best visibility over the island, and forming a meticulous plan to dismantle their ranks surgically. It is a real slow-burn flavour of stealth that will come as a wet slap to Assassins Creed fans but reminds me of PC classics from a quarter century ago like Commandos or Jagged Alliance. 

The old “drop the crane on passersby,” a stealth classic

If you have played those older stealth strategy games, you will no doubt appreciate the value of the quick save. The idea of save scumming, or quickly reloading when the events look to be heading in a grim direction is baked into the very plot of this game. The supernatural curse that affects your pirate crew will flash a foreboding bell over the screen every so often, a not-so-subtle reminder to quick save, and a necessary habit that any newcomers will be required to adopt. 

The strategic tools on offer will require mastery from the player to either remove or bypass the inquisitors that stand in the way of the objective. For instance, a marker can be placed in the world to show the intersecting view cones of enemy patrols. Elsewhere, time can be paused to allow players to plot out movements or simultaneous executions between the three individual crew members you have taken off the ship. But beware, the best plans cannot account for disruptive enemy behaviour, meaning that the vulnerability and tension of being pirates on the precipice of life and death never really subsides. If anxiety followed by the elation of a hard-won sneaky success is what you crave, Shadow Gambit knows how to deliver in spades. 

The game also sports a terrifically diverse cast of pirates to choose from, the first on offer being Afia Manicato, who forms a contract with a magic ghost ship called the Red Marley. Right off the bat, her character is immediately striking and interesting, with a thick accent and blade stowed in the magical void that occupies her ribcage. From visual design, voice acting, unique abilities, and questlines, the crew of the Red Marley brings the personality and character that the plot otherwise glosses over with quick dialogue exchanges.

The infiltration options are deliciously daunting

There is a great game to be divined here, but it is lurking beneath the turbulent waters of the wacky control scheme. Whether with a controller or keyboard and mouse, both input methods present unique obstacles and advantages for manoeuvring your pirates and executing elaborate assassinations. The controller offers direct movement control over your characters rather than the often unusual pathfinding of the mouse. However, the mouse offers the crucial precision needed when the alarm sounds and life or death could be moments away. I almost always wanted to throw my controller when shit hit the fan. I would be locked into animations for contextually overlapping actions I didn’t mean to select, the camera would whip into the nearest wall, and the game would not respond to my inputs as I would expect, resulting in a quick game over.

Obviously and unfortunately, I never found a comfortable groove with the controls. This may not be a big deal for some, with heaps of customisation options on offer. For me, the problem was often less to do with the button layout, and more with how the game responds to my inputs and the frustration that results from accidental animation lock-ins and minor bugs. Every second counts and the game pushes the player to rely on these controls in real-time. Too often my crew would die under a rain of bullet fire in various states of pants-down vulnerability. One crew member has all their abilities on cooldown, another is bugging out saying it is carrying an enemy that it clearly isn’t, and the third merry stooge is just marginally out of range of an execution that probably wouldn’t have made a difference to the impending game over. Oh well, reload, I guess. I can save scum with the best of them, but it felt required rather than optional in order to inch ahead.

In the next three seconds, nobody will remain standing

Final Thoughts 

Broken down to its bare essentials, Shadow Gambit is not a dynamic, stealth-driven strategy game. Rather, it is a sneaky puzzle game with the control scheme of something resembling a real-time strategy game. An island, fort, or portside town might initially seem littered with trigger-happy inquisitors but upon closer, patient inspection, the game reveals these enemies to be moving in small routines. Zoom out a little, and you see a maze of enemy movement patterns, with your supernatural swashbucklers having a myriad of deadly skills that will surgically dismantle the pesky invaders. Pause time, consider visibility and view cones, and then execute the island mobs in a precise sequence. Rinse, repeat, for many, many hours. If this niche brand of stealth strategy appeals, then there is heaps here paired with a fantastically presented world and characters for a jolly good time.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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