GamerEscape

Yarrrr. I don’t know if it’s come out before, but I’m definitely a big pirate buff, both IRL and in media and games. Enough that I’ve spent…. way too much on my pirate garb and developing a pirate persona. And somewhat frustratingly, video games and pirates don’t cross paths as often as I’d like.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that I was certainly pleased to hear about Flint: Treasure of Oblivion (released on December 17, 2024, developed by Savage Level, published by Microids and played on PC via Steam for this review). Anything remotely involving the Golden Age of Piracy pretty much obligates me to check it out. It can be tough being a pirate gamer; good stuff just doesn’t come around all that often. Will I be able to count this among them? Let’s set sail on a (hopefully) rousing pirate adventure!

Panels of Piracy

Flint: Treasure of Oblivion puts you in control of Captain James Flint, first mate Billy Bones, and a whole crew of others recruited along the way in search of a mysterious treasure on a map handed to you by a crazy “old dotard.” From a shipwreck, to jail time, to mutinies, to everything else you can imagine, the storyline easily checks all the piracy trope boxes. This game is a turn-based tactical RPG, and everything revolves around the story. It is interesting enough, but I kind of hate to admit that the plot is just too standard and typical. Maybe this is why we don’t get that many pirate games…. It’s enjoyable enough, to be fair. In fact, it’s probably the highlight of the whole experience. I just wish it stood out more amongst its peers.

Unfortunately, I don’t really care for the methods in which the story is told. It’s a total hodgepodge of different narrative elements. From the mix of real-feeling cutscenes and highly artistic ones with good voiceovers, to the semi-real-yet-oddly-basic-for-2024 game world asethetics and the bizzare comic-book-panel dialogue storytelling, the game can’t decide how it wants to present its story to you. The story itself is fine, it’s the presentation that kills it.

The main character, James Flint, is the only one worth talking about. I have a sort of like-hate relationship with him. Not bad for a pirate I guess, but for a “protagonist” he’s kind of difficult to like. Flint is ruthless, and will do anything and everything to get out of a tight spot, from deception to cold blooded murder. Whatever it takes to find the treasure he’s after. I like that he’s committed, but I much prefer the good pirate tropes where piracy is about freedom from the state or crown. Perhaps “Chaotic Good” in Dungeons & Dragons terms

Despite its promotion as a feature, I definitely liked the comic book elements the least. They are presented in total silence outside of the existing background music, leaving you to imagine the sound effects and speech that would be going on. The panels appear one at a time, as if this would be standard RPG dialogue, but it’s very irritating in this format and I would just click through them. Except it’s essential plot material so I have to go through it. I would have strongly preferred regular RPG dialogue (ideally with good voice acting, which the game has in its cutscenes) coupled with in-engine cutscenes and animations. I’m a PIRATE fan, not a comic book fan. I guess there are some people who are both, but if there was ever a good comic book series set in the golden age of piracy, I’m not familiar with it…

Please Read the Instructions

OK, so the story aspect is somewhat of a miss. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world if the gameplay is enjoyable, even in an RPG. I regret to prematurely spoil the rest of this section, but unfortunately, the gameplay is a bigger miss. It’s so close to being perfectly fine, but there are so many problems, it’s hard to see the positives.

The biggest problem is the new player onboarding experience. Despite the dearth of good pirate RPGs out there, this game decided it needed to tell its new players to RTFM (“Read The ????? Manual”) instead of introduce its concepts in a friendly way. There are a few tutorials in the opening battles, but every loading screen offers a singluar loading screen tip: “Please read the instructions carefully to make the most of the game and improve your experience.”

It has been well over a decade since video games routinely included instruction manuals. Nearly all games today go the route of in-game tutorials (that are ideally skippable on repeat playthroughs). The directive to read the instructions, combined with the dice rolling and stuff, makes me feel more like I’m playing one of those old RPG board games. You know, the ones that you’d invite friends over to play and they end up making an excuse to leave while you’re explaining the rules, before you even start playing?

There are several problems with this. The basic battle gameplay loop is quite similar to that of games like the Fire Emblem series, in which you control all of your units on your turn in any order you like and then the enemy does the same for their turn. That’s the easy part. The hard part is the unintuitive controls that are only partially explained within the gameplay. The mostly pictoral menus are difficult to understand without mousing over everything and waiting for the tooltips to (hopefully) appear. The game wanting you to read the instructions on your own time, and even those instructions themselves somehow managing not to fully teach you the game’s mechanics.

I STILL don’t know how the game’s dice-rolling system works, and yes, I read the instructions. I just click on buttons, click on enemies, watch the dice spin, and hope it says “success” instead of “failure.” But that’s not even the end of it; you have to roll a second “effect” die with most actions, adorned with some of the most nonsensical icons I’ve ever seen. Now I’ll be honest here, unless I’m playing a Dungeons & Dragons game, where it’s widely expected, I generally dislike dice rolls in these kinds of games. They should have simply took a page from Fire Emblem, the series that practically wrote the book on turn based strategy RPG video games, and showed me numbers and percentages. Show me a % chance to hit, how much damage will be dealt when it does hit, crit chance, et cetera, and text descriptions of special effects.

That’s way easier to understand than animated dice with cryptic glyphs on them that force you to check the instructions for every new one you see. Seriously, most gamers don’t want to read a book before playing, and the Flint developers’ insistence on you doing your own work to “improve your experience” is borderline asinine. Most people are going to lose patience with this very quickly. I was obligated to do so for the sake of this review, sadly.

Another problem is the characters don’t really have any uniqueness to them. There’s a whole range of weapons that can be equipped, and certain characters do have special actions they can perform if standing next to each other. But for the most part, the same set of skills and actions associated with the different types of weapons seem to be available to everyone. This does flesh out a bit over time, if you can get that far, but aside from some battle-specific gimmicks like pushing barrels to crush enemies, I feel like there isn’t enough variety. There are many people in your crew but I basically ended up just picking the characters I liked rather than picking them for their battle capabilities. And other than James Flint and Billy Bones, the characters are mostly forgettable.

What this all adds up to is this: If you read the manual and fully understand all the game mechanics, you’re still screwed because there are things that just aren’t explained well or at all, like how to buy, equip, and use items, leveling up your crew, and how to choose members for battle. And once you figure all of that out, what you get is still an extremely luck-dependent battle system that just isn’t all that satisfying. The game does offer various mechanics to mitigate the luck elements, but even those aren’t explained to you. I kept getting these items that give me a do-over on a dice throw, but I was never told how to use them. It’s presented as an item, but it isn’t used like other items, and instead you click on a small card-like icon next to the dice you just rolled. I restarted battles so many times for unfavorable luck before I figured this out. Even worse, the very first battles in the game can easily be lost due to bad luck, and you only get so many do-over items.

It feels more like a casino simulator than a proper battle system, and this even extends outside of battle. Your playthrough could end up being a lot easier or harder than mine, thanks in part to the dice rolls in the out-of-combat scenes. Many times, you encounter a door, a chest, or something else, and you have to roll a d20 to see if you gain access or succeed in an event. You only get one chance – re-rolls can’t be used here – and if you fail, you will never find out what was in that chest or behind that door without starting the entire game over, as the game exclusively uses auto-saving, with only one save slot.

One thing that isn’t necessairly bad but just plain weird is the progression system. You earn money (booty) as you complete battles. This money both serves as a means to aquire supplies from the “galley” (Dear Flint developers: a galley is the place where food is prepared, not a shop where you buy armor, smoke bombs and healing items), but also to level up your units. You have to “share out” the booty to each unit you want to level up. On one hand, this is nice since units don’t have to participate in a battle to get stronger, but on the other hand, you have to ration the EXP since you also use it to buy items. It’s a theoretically interesting system but it’s difficult to know what items you might need in the future, and with no obvious opportunities to grind, the booty is in short supply.

Bronze Age of Piracy

So now comes the look and feel section. I’ve touched on some of it already, but here we go anyway. The pre-rendered cutscenes are great, with good art, solid voiceovers, and so on. The in-world graphics…feel dated. Unreal Engine 4 is capable of way more than this game is offering. The game honestly looks like it could have come out a decade ago. The overall aesthetic (minus the comic book panels, which look like they belong in an entirely different game) is good, but there are plenty of things that could have been improved. The artwork is pretty low resolution. This is probably because of the fixed camera distance throughout most of the game, but the characters in particular still manage to look fuzzy and low-poly.

The music is another positive element of the experience. A good variety of tracks are available with just the right amount of piratey feel. Some games try too hard here and end up too sounding too cliche. The main problem is, with rather limited sound effects and no voices outside of the pre-rendered cutscenes, the music is almost all ye be hearin,’ matey. Maybe it was intended we’d be using our imagination, particularly with the comic book storyboards, but personally, I’ll read a book for that.

Unfortunately, the good soundtrack presents a problem, as while there is a digital soundtrack available, it’s only available as part of the “digital deluxe” edition (which comprises entirely outside-of-game features like a 3D printing file for a James Flint figure. Swag you actually have to make yourself with a 3D printer doesn’t really feel very deluxe) and while it can be purchased after the fact, it can’t be purchased seperately from the game. Which I would, because the composer deserves credit for the solid soundtrack put into a game that sadly can’t use it to its fullest.

Walking the Plank

A draft of this review started while I was playing was somewhat more positive. But as I got further, it felt more and more like I was sugar-coating things and telling myself, “this has potential, maybe it will get better.” Unfortunately it didn’t, and I left Flint feeling simply disappointed. There are moments of clarity – the narrative is fine, and the soundtrack is solid. The game mechanics had the potential to be good, were they presented to the player more effectively, and used more traditional systems to determine outcomes instead of the awful dice rolling. I suppose it could have worked if the game was forgiving enough that a bad dice roll wasn’t the end of the world, but it often is, especially when you run out of do-overs.

In the end, I found myself wanting to sail far away from this game. It had potential, but that potential was squandered. I’d rather walk the plank, or at least play almost any other pirate themed game, from Sea of Thieves, to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, to Sid Meier’s Pirates!, to the Monkey Island series, to even Skull and Bones (which I actively play and wish I got to review, as it’s far more fun than the publicity it got). Play any of those over this. If you can tolerate the game seeming to actively want to test your patience, the story has its moments and may be worth experiencing, but that’s a pretty big if.

~ Final Score: 4/10 ~

Review copy provided by Microids for PC via Steam. Screenshots taken by reviewer. Featured Image provided by Microids.