Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. The new stealth strategy by Mimimi Games!

After a long wait for stealth strategy fans, Mimimi Games today officially announced its next project, codenamed Süßkartoffel (sweet potato). And its name: Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. We had the honour to be present at the presentation of the game by the developers themselves and the co-founder of the company, Dominik Abé, who also answered our questions regarding the game. Let's take a look at the main elements of the game in order.

Right from the reveal trailer we can see that the setting has Pirates of the Caribbean vibes, with a strong presence of the supernatural. Our characters are not limited by realistic abilities, they are after all part of a cursed crew. It seems that Mimimi took the concept of Isabelle's character from Desperados III and developed it even further to create entire gameplay around her "extraordinary" abilities compared to the rest of the team. This extra step gives a different identity to the larger game, which, with the alternate world of the Lost Caribbean as a backdrop, focuses on the metaphysical and incorporates some gameplay innovations that aim to increase the immersion of the title as much as possible. One example is the ability to manipulate time, via a rewind mechanism that allows the player to instantly correct mistakes without having to load a previous game state (e.g. via quickload).

During the presentation we had the chance to view three of the nine crew characters that will be available when the game is released. The gameplay given the setting opens up a lot with the supernatural qualities of the crew being front and center. Mimimi claims her goal during the design is to push the player to adopt the thought that they can do whatever they want in whatever way they want, without being constrained by a "perfectly correct" way of performing each mission. Of course there will be opportunities for optimised builds, but that's not the goal in this title. From what we've seen, we're positively predisposed.  

This is facilitated by the fact that Shadow Gambit takes a sandbox approach, instead of the linear progression/narrative in each mission, which is integrated into the main plot. The decision centre is our ship, Red Marley, from which we can choose our crew (after gradually unlocking characters) and the mission we want to perform. We are even able to choose where the ship will dock, resulting in a different starting point on each map-level. Mimimi Games claims that the numerous team combinations with different entrance-exit paths per level significantly increase the replayability of the title. The team composition largely determines the map approach and Dominik Abé focused on his personal example that one can have a preferred character combination for their team but with a different team can rediscover the game because of the combinations offered.

Until then we leave you with the extensive first gameplay trailer and some of the photos taken from the game!

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