Let us speak of the bong; if death is inevitable in Shadow Gambit, then so too is the tremulous peal of the Red Marley’s phantom bell. With the press of a button, it chimes across the ethereal plane, solidifying a moment into a memory, and with another button, the past becomes present as the memory is restored: in an instance, lessons are learned, mistakes are undone, the slate is wiped clean to try, try again.
It’s a temporal dance that’ll be immediately familiar to those who’ve played developer Mimimi’s previous games. With the likes of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, the studio has carved a wonderfully specific niche for itself over the years, creating top-down squad-based stealth-tactics games very much inspired by genre classics like Commandos and Desperados – where margin for error is minimal and save scumming is elevated to high art. That one-two of quick-save and quick-load – here represented by Red Marley’s thunderous bong – might be familiar, but in Shadow Gambit it also feels different somehow. Its bong is so profoundly, theatrically woven into the fabric of its story, so brazenly part of its identity – crashing in amid swirling green mists at one end, smashing violently out of shattering glass at the other – it becomes a mechanic proudly, confidently made motif, and goodness, is Shadow Gambit assured.
That starts with the setting; while Mimimi’s earlier games played it relatively straight in terms of historical realism, Shadow Gambit presents a wonderfully realised alternative vision of the golden age of piracy, where cursed undead crews roam the seas battling an order of religious fanatics known as the Inquisition. At the centre of it all is Afia Manicat, an ambitious undead pirate with a plan in her head, a conveniently accessible cutlass through her heart, and, after a confidently swashbuckling opening, an invitation to join the crew of the Red Marley, a sentient ship currently on the hunt for its former captain’s legendary treasure.
