Shadow Gambit The Cursed Crew

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is the final game from Mimimi Games (the studio behind Desperados III and Shadow Tactics) and arguably their most ambitious. The setting is a fantastical Golden Age of Piracy in a Caribbean that holds magic, ghosts and an Inquisition determined to wipe out everything strange in the region. You command a ghost ship and an undead pirate crew, working to recover a powerful artifact before the Inquisition does.

Eight individual undead crew members are recruitable across the campaign, each with their own personality and supernatural ability. Gaëlle has a magical cannon that can launch friends — or foes — into the air. Mr. Mercury can bypass obstacles by traveling underground. Von Presswald can possess enemy guards to walk past their own checkpoints. Suledie can create cover from nothing for sneak approaches. Each crew member's kit is built around a specific tactical archetype — movement manipulation, infiltration, body disposal, raw killing — and missions limit how many you can bring at once.

The campaign is genuinely non-linear. Missions can be tackled in any order; crew members can be recruited at any pace; each island offers multiple landing and departure points so you choose whether to start near or far from the objective. Your composition determines the abilities available, which in turn shapes which solutions to each mission exist for you. There are no wrong choices, but there are very different playthroughs.

The Inquisition forces are numerous and well-armed, and a fair fight is rarely survivable. The genre's standard mix of cover, shadow, distraction and synchronized kills applies, with the addition of magical abilities that give the crew options unavailable in Mimimi's earlier games. Between missions, your ghost ship is a hub where crew personal stories play out and the strategic decisions for the next island get made. Shadow Gambit is the most ambitious stealth-tactics game of its generation and a strong send-off for the studio that built the modern version of the genre.