Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew’s Unique Stealth-Strategy Is One of 2023’s Biggest Surprises

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The ship’s cook slowly approached the Inquisition checkpoint. He whistled from around the corner, drawing one guard away from his post while my navigator teleported through the wall to kill the other one. As the remaining Inquisitor neared the bush where the rest of my crew was hiding, my ghostly spy possessed him. The spy, now a supernatural Agent 47 wearing the guard’s body as a disguise, returned to the checkpoint and waited, sabotaging a suspended crate to crush the approaching Inquisition leader, leaving the rest of my squad free to rescue the final Cursed crewmate and make our escape. Imagine many more moments like that and you’ll have a good idea of what it was like to preview Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew.

Shadow Gambit is an isometric, squad-based stealth strategy game, populated by a diverse, bizarre cast of idiosyncratic supernatural pirates. And based on what I’ve played thus far, it’s shaping up to be a fantastic time. It deftly balanced both fairly open-ended levels and tightly crafted encounter design, it gave me all the tools, the characters, and the room to do things my way, and it let me come up with fun, creative solutions as I stole my way through the Lost Caribbean.

Taking place in an alternate-history during the Golden Age of Piracy, I explored a fictional archipelago called The Timeless Shores. In this version of Earth, soul energy suffuses the world, and a Curse keeps the dead alive, granting them bizarre and varied supernatural abilities. The Cursed are powerful, but few in number, and they are being hunted down by the Inquisition, a group of religious zealots who serve a powerful being called “The Maiden.” She blesses the Inquisition with something called The Maiden’s Fire, allowing them to