Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew review

Annoyingly, you can’t knock over both of those MacGuffins at once even if they’re on the same map. I made the mistake early on of playing another mission on an island I’d already visited. My hope at the time was, best case, I could knock over both missions at once—they’re on the same island, right?—and, worst case, I’d clear out a bunch of enemies to make a follow-up easier. Neither proved true.

Because of this, you never feel that you’re making an impact on the world despite a plot that lends itself to consequences via a threatening antagonist. Oftentimes, it felt like the same enemy types were populating all-too-familiar maps, walking the same patrol paths and, ultimately, being dispatched in familiar ways. Given the afterlife motif of the story, maybe this is some subtext commentary on the Groundhog Day nature of purgatory. But I doubt it.

Effectively, it meant I had to recycle increasingly tired maps 12 times to unlock the rest of the crew after the game gifted me the first two. Later on in the campaign, there’s an Assassins Creed II-like requirement to complete what amounts to side missions just to finish the main missions (and a lot of them at that). It’s a clumsy way to handle the campaign that makes things feel more filler than killer as soon as you notice them.

The most frustrating part, though, is how many killer moments there are when the filler isn’t front and center. Moment-to-moment gameplay is honed to a fine art thanks a lot to a collective character-ability suite that’s among the best the genre has seen (so long as you overlook a couple of the lazier mainstays).

Launching enemies out of a back-strapped cannon at other enemies never got old and neither did using a fishing rod to disappear cadavers.

As you might be able to tell from that last sentence, Mimimi isn’t afraid to go weird. And by leaning into the otherworldly abilities of its main cast, there are some abilities that are as satisfying as they are brutally effective. It wasn’t hard to find my favourites. But Mimimi anticipates this and, cleverly, introduces a straightforward system that incentivises you to try a completely new crew in subsequent missions.

This is a really clever way to familiarise yourself with the characters you unlock last, and some of the upgrades it leads to are incredibly powerful. It’s great to see some mission-length variety in here, too. Certain missions I knocked over in under 20 minutes. Others took closer to an hour. By the time you get to the end of the game, it’s not only a welcome new location, it also has some of the trickiest and most satisfying stealth puzzles.

It likely would have been a whole lot easier if I trusted Shadow Mode. But for me, by switching to RTS controls, the game seemingly also made some of the individual character Shadow Mode shortcuts the same as other characters’ ability shortcuts. I didn’t realise this until the end of the game, and it’s not something that was part of Mimimi’s earlier games (I checked).

On one hand, the lack of reliable Shadow Mode in my experience led to some very satisfying moments where I was taking out multiple guards with multiple characters in real time. On the other hand, this issue made the final section feel next to impossible in a massive difficulty spike that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. As it stands, the gamification of save-scumming—used to encourage player experimentation—did make me feel supported in these moments of frustration.

I get that this is Mimimi sailing alone for the first time without the commission of a publisher. But it’s too easy to see the pacing tweaks—nixing one of the MacGuffins (or both), making the crew missions optional, and/or letting players complete multiple objectives per island—to excuse everything. Besides, Mimimi has nailed this gameplay glue in the past, which makes it all the more confusing. If Shadow Gambit had the pacing and storytelling of the older games, it would’ve been another booming broadside. As it stands, it’s left me craving the tightly executed experiences of Mimimi’s previous games.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is available for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.