Of course, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is at its best when you feel you’ve pulled off the impossible, dodging the vision cones of an enemy’s path so you can sneak into a stronghold and poke holes in their security. Y’know. The good stuff. Thankfully one of the tools under your belt is the very encouraged quick save feature to ‘save scum,’ creating points in time just in case a risky play doesn’t pan out. The game even contextualises these in its world, labeling these save points as Memories. This meta marriage of gameplay and the world goes one step further in-game with players’ ability to pause the game world, assigning one action (move here, kill a foe, etc) and hitting execute to resume time and have many events pulled off simultaneously, labeled as ‘Shadow Mode.’

The other MVP for pulling off ridiculous feats is Pinkers, a regal chap who can use his soul to possess patrolling enemies and pose as them. From there, if you’re careful enough, you can piggyback between enemies, extending your reach further and further across a map all while hiding in plain sight from a foe. As an absolute fiend for systems-heavy games and stealth mechanics, I feel like I’ve had my third eye opened for the genre, experiencing some of the best in the niche space in years.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a game very intent on having players spend dozens upon dozens of hours inside its world. Along with the returning challenge medals and feats for players to work towards in missions, ticking off a completion list, there are now challenge rooms and side stories for your cast of characters. In your downtime between jobs, you can chat away on the Marley, engaging in hijinks such as Suleidy healing the entire crew of a ghost parasite and samurai-like crew member inadvertently taking on and tutoring a talking fish. These are all well worth engaging in because there’s quite the funny and novel writing in there, along with the bonus that this adds to your slowly growing ‘Vigor’ level, with each time this levels up it netting you a valuable upgrade to a crew member’s ability effectiveness.

The mission structure is also a mixed bag. Instead of the prior approach of individual, isolated missions and locations that lead into the next, you’re traveling between the same set of islands. Yes, this means you can intimately know the ins and outs of a location as you visit for either a main story task or a resource run for a Black Pearl, but that’s a double-edged sword. Your time with the game bleeds together. Jaunts through areas begin to feel repetitious and they too don’t lend themselves to some of the epic setpieces we’ve come to know from Mimimi.

With how many moving parts are ongoing in systems-heavy games like this, it’s a miracle they run at all. Dozens upon dozens of characters with different pathways and animations. Mechanics that foster you breaking the game down. It’s a cool thing to see in action. However, the seams are visible a little more this time around with the considerable amount of technical issues I’ve had with the game. When there are a lot of actions going on on-screen the game will often freeze or stutter before it chugs itself back into place. This also created immersion ruining music and audio cues audibly skipping. I experienced little fleeting moments of that in prior games from the developer, but now they’re a lot more frequent.

The most gutwrenching issue are the few times now that I’ve run into progress preventing bugs. A few times now a compulsory mission struggled to trigger a certain event to conclude the job. These issues eventually sorted themselves out with a patch or two but may still see their way into the final product. It’s worth mentioning because mileage certainly may vary.

In between a rock and a hard place, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is in a tough spot for loyal fans of the genre. Utilised is some of the best stealth mechanics I’ve ever seen and pulling off what feels like the impossible is as joyous as ever. Still, a lackluster quest structure and plenty of technical issues stop this from being the most seamless jaunt across the high seas.