Cleo - a pirate's tale

Cleo - a pirate's tale is a solo-developed retro pirate adventure with the visual language of old Zelda games and the comedic sensibility of classic LucasArts adventures. The protagonist, Cleo, is a 14-year-old cynic living a repetitive life with her father in a bar where the legendary tales of Captain Cabeca circulate among boring fishermen and unsuccessful pirates. When she finds a strange pirate logbook and is given a mysterious hint by a ghost, her life is suddenly tipped into the kind of adventure she'd previously only heard about.

The central plot follows Cleo's pursuit of the Treasure of Eternal Memory across a world of lies, deceit, greed and bad breath. The presentation leans on top-down pixel art and a linear story structure rather than open-world sprawl, which keeps the pacing tight and the writing focused on the small moments that give the world its character. Full voice acting in English and German covers the entire script, which was funded successfully on Kickstarter in 2020 before the late 2021 release.

Kraken Fodder is the game's notable side activity — a card-and-dice game taken with grave seriousness by the fishermen and pirates of the world, played in roughly five-minute rounds where you destroy your opponent's deck with cannonballs. Cleo plays Kraken Fodder against several NPCs across the story, and learning the game well enough to win those matches becomes a real progression hook in its own right. The combination of linear adventure plotting, a small-scale character-driven story, and a deeply considered mini-game makes the package feel substantially larger than its solo-developer origins.