Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

Shadow Gambit is a 2023 real-time stealth tactics game from Mimimi. You command the crew of the Red Marley, a living ship, whose members are cursed pirates brought back from the dead. The crew sails between islands held by an Inquisition, raising fallen crewmates and searching for a treasure.

It keeps Mimimi's formula, large maps, sight cones and a mode for coordinated actions, and gives each pirate supernatural powers: teleporting, possessing people, stopping time. You can save at any moment, and the islands can be revisited with different crews.

The powers make it the most inventive game Mimimi made. Islands revisited with different crews give it more replay than the earlier games, and its tone is light and warm.

Its open structure has less of the hand-made map design that made Shadow Tactics and Desperados III great. Mimimi announced its closure shortly after release, citing the rising costs of development.

Shadow Gambit keeps Commandos' stealth and specialists and replaces their tools with magic. It is the end of the line that Mimimi started with Shadow Tactics, and a reminder of how much the genre owes to one studio.