Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew was the last time we saw a game centered around pirates that relied on strategy and stealth over real-time action. It was a great game that will sadly never get a sequel since the developers were dissolved last year. A new pirate game, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion, also uses strategic gameplay as its main hook, and we recently tried out the latest preview build.

The preview build only told a tiny bit of the game's story. You play the role of Captain Flint; along with your friend Billy Bones, you're investigating the rumor of a secret map hidden in a graveyard. According to the game's store page, the journey will take you from several European port towns and into the Caribbean and central America. According to several interviews with the developers, this is the same Captain Flint whose treasure was the focus of the book Treasure Island, making this an unofficial prequel to that Robert Louis Stevenson classic.

The game takes on the same isometric perspective that so many other CRPGs have used throughout the genre's existence. The environments are a bit linear, but they have a few branching paths that hide extra items and interactions. There are a few areas where you can make some choices that might affect the game later, such as whether you want to kill a sleeping drunkard or wake them up, so their snoring doesn't alert more guards in an area. The game uses comic book cut scenes to tell the story and convey important events.

It doesn't take long before you enter a fight, and then the game gets interesting. Movement is hex-based, and action points govern which moves each person in your party can do during their turn. Most of the actions will be familiar to CRPG and strategy fans, but it is nice to see various options you can do to opponents while moving, such as tackling them or pushing them to another spot. Once you decide to initiate an action, dice appear on the screen, and you need to click to roll them. The number of dice you'll roll depends on the action you take, and some of the dice even have sides that call for automatic success or failure on a roll. Regardless of the outcome, some of the dice rolls come with a bonus die that is rolled afterward to apply bonus statuses on the enemy. That can range from simple things, like applying bleed to vertigo to knocking them down for at least a round. There's also another side that calls for automatic death if you get lucky enough to roll it.

The dice-based system is intriguing, since most RPGs have run on mechanics that are similar but were largely invisible. Seeing the dice in action makes things less mysterious — in theory. The problem is that we're still not sure what constitutes a bad or good throw, except for the color the dice take on at the end of a throw. The preview build begins a little past the game's opening stages, but it's unclear why one throw's result in a fight is better than another's. Something that's inherent in dice is the randomness of the results. The variation on the results is so wild that death was the only constant; one bad throw suddenly started a chain reaction where a character got killed or an objective was rendered impossible to fulfill. Depending on how the dice rolls turn out in the final game, this could become a big point of frustration that can lead players to drop the title if bad rolls occur very early and often.

It's difficult to get a clear picture of how Flint: Treasure of Oblivion will play based on the preview build. The build had some limitations, so we didn't get to see if the game will feature more than a few fights and town exploration at night. The hex-based strategy system with action points is intriguing, but you will need to play a few battles before you can come to grips with how it works. The dice system remains difficult to decipher, and the randomness means you'll likely have to replay the same fights multiple times. The game releases on Oct. 24, 2024, and we hope that the final game lives up to its potential.