Mimimi Games revived a genre, pushed it forward, and then shut down
Mimimi Games didn’t set out to make a trilogy of stealth strategy games. But once the studio shut its doors in December, after the release of its final DLC pack and content update for Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, a trilogy of stealth strategy games is the prevailing legacy it left behind.
“If I had had the chance to continue, I think we would have tried to pivot — to try to do something else,” Moritz Wagner, Mimimi’s creative director, told me on a video call. “Because I think this team is very good, and we could have made something else, whatever it is, just as well.”
The German studio existed atop a razor’s edge for most of its lifespan. In 2016, with a mobile game and a “university project turned kid-friendly adventure” on its resume, Mimimi released Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Billed as a real-time tactics game, Shadow Tactics drew clear inspiration from Pyro Studios’ Commandos series, replacing the latter’s World War II setting with that of feudal Japan. Shadow Tactics was well received — Polygon’s review was glowing — but it brought Mimimi “dangerously close to bankruptcy.” Despite its ingenious isometric level design and clever squad-based stealth missions, it was still a niche project inspired by a niche series.
It was enough to attract the attention of THQ Nordic, though. The publisher had acquired the rights to the Desperados series, Spellbound Entertainment’s early-aughts stealth games, and gave Mimimi the nod to make Desperados 3. The series’ cachet and the studio’s talent combined for yet another stellar reception (along with more players, judging by Steam charts), clearing the way for Mimimi to work on a brand-new IP: this year’s Shadow Gambit, a stealth strategy game about undead pirates with
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