Cursed Crew
Last updated: 2025-06-26
- Pirate roguelike with detailed crew management.
- Engaging pirate theme and ship combat.
- Unique art style, atmospheric audio.
- Frequent game-breaking bugs reported.
- High price, insufficient content.
- Broken tutorial, poor crew AI.
Emotions
Emotion: satisfaction
Emotion: enjoyment
Emotion: excitement
Emotion: frustration
Emotion: disappointment
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 78% · Negative 22%. Score: 22 / 100
Positives:
- Players find the game highly enjoyable and see significant potential for future development, appreciating the current design and developer commitment. It's considered a fun and well-made early access title, offering good value for money.
- The game successfully captures the pirate fantasy, with players specifically enjoying the naval combat and fighting various enemies. It's often compared positively to games like FTL and Don't Starve, offering a unique and fun pirate adventure with satisfying combat.
- Players appreciate the game's challenging nature and extensive tactical options, which contribute to high replayability. Each game session is unique, keeping gameplay fresh and engaging despite repeated playthroughs.
- The game's sound design and music are highly praised, with specific mentions of its spooky, mysterious, and fitting atmosphere. The intro music, in particular, is loved for its unique style.
- The game features a unique and appealing art style, characterized by minimalist yet detailed graphics and fitting color palettes. The artwork is consistently praised as beautiful and well-suited to the game's feel.
Negatives:
- The game is plagued by numerous bugs, including frequent crashes, freezes, and progression blockers. These issues significantly hinder gameplay and can lead to frustrating, unrecoverable situations.
- Many players feel the game's current content and state do not justify its price point. There's a consistent sentiment that the game feels incomplete, lacks variety, and needs significant additions to be worth the cost.
- The tutorial system is a significant pain point, either being entirely absent in some areas or present but broken, clunky, and ineffective at explaining core mechanics. This leaves new players confused and frustrated.
- Players express concern over the lack of consistent and substantial updates, leading to a perception that the game has been largely abandoned by its developers. This contributes to the feeling of an incomplete product.
- Crew members exhibit poor artificial intelligence, often failing to react appropriately to dangers like fire or sharks, or performing actions inefficiently. Players also report limited and clunky UI control over their crew, leading to frustration and unnecessary losses.
Gameplay:
- The game is a pirate-themed roguelike that blends ship combat, crew management, and colony simulation. It features an FTL/Slay the Spire-like map progression with random events and boss fights, defining its core gameplay loop.
- Players actively manage a variable crew, assigning them diverse tasks like crafting, repairing, manning cannons, and sailing. This deep management fosters a bond with the crew as they overcome challenges together, emphasizing their importance.
- The game features significant survival and crafting elements, including hunger, sleep, and resource management. Players must hoard and manage supplies, which become increasingly challenging to maintain as the journey progresses.
- Ship combat requires micro-management of turning, firing, and repairs, with crew members actively involved. Players can maintain, upgrade, and unlock new ships, customizing their layout to optimize performance.
- The game is described as quite demanding with a definite learning curve, suggesting complexity that new players will need to overcome. However, it also offers a lot of content to explore once mastered.
Performance:
- Players frequently experience significant frame rate drops and entity-related lag, particularly when there are many crew members, loot, or enemies on the ship, and during intense ship combat scenarios. This indicates a need for optimization in handling numerous on-screen entities.
Recommendations:
- Many players highly recommend the game, especially for fans of roguelikes, Don't Starve, or Mount and Blade, and those who enjoy pirate themes. It is seen as a good value for its current state, with high expectations for its Early Access development.
- Players advise caution due to the game being in Early Access, suggesting it needs more development time to fully come together. Some recommend waiting for future updates or buying primarily to support the developers.
- One specific point of feedback highlights that some players found the controls to be awkward. This could be a deterrent for those sensitive to control schemes and indicates an area for potential improvement.
- Players are advised to try the available demo to experience the game firsthand before making a purchase decision. This is a practical suggestion for potential buyers to assess suitability.
- Players express general encouragement for the developers to continue their work on the game. This indicates overall satisfaction and hope for future improvements and content.
Miscellaneous:
- The game's art style is frequently compared to 'Don't Starve'. Reviewers also note its unique blend of gameplay elements, drawing comparisons to games like 'RimWorld', 'Sea of Thieves', and 'FTL', often described as 'Rimworld on a boat' or 'Don't Starve with pirates'.
- Reviewers express positive anticipation for the game's future development, including the addition of new content like ship tiers and overall game growth. This indicates a positive outlook on the game's potential.
- The game was accessible to players through a provided demo or pre-Early Access period. This allowed players to experience the game before its full public release.
- The developers are noted for their previous experience creating high-quality mods. This background may influence player expectations regarding the game's design and future content.
- The game's wave visuals are highlighted as being particularly striking or "crazy." This indicates a positive reception of the environmental graphics.
