The pirate’s life is one of exploration, adventure, larger than life characters, and simple goals. In other words, it’s the perfect setting in which to stage a videogame. This makes me wonder why there seem to be so few great pirate games released in recent years. With the exception of Sid Mayer’s Pirates, I can’t really think of any great titles set in pirate worlds. Pixel Piracy, an indie game about pirates currently available on Steam, ultimately doesn’t do much to change that trend.
Pixel Piracy is a side scrolling game where you are supposed to manage your ship and pirate crew as you take on adventures on the high seas. You are tasked with one simple, if somewhat vague goal: defeat four legendary pirates.
The game does put off a good initial impression as you get started. You get to set some customization in your world and choose the starting characteristics of your pirate. Depending on what you choose, you start with different stats and perks. Visually, the game looks great, and the music is very fitting. Unfortunately once you’re past the world generation phase the issues begin to pile on quickly.
Pixel Piracy starts to feel unfinished pretty much immediately. There are missing features, and some details that make the game feel like it still is in early access (for the record, it’s not). For example, the pronouns for all of the characters are male, despite being able to play as a female. While a minor detail like that takes you out of the experience, there are more severe ones that actually affect game play. Here are a few examples of the issues I found: Pirates that refused to leave enemy ships, the interact button suddenly not working, my main pirate stopped eating (despite not having the anorexic perk) which forced me to have to start over, and on occasion a pirate kicked another one overboard when cleaning the turds off of the deck. To be fair, Quadro Delta seems to be releasing patches and fixing bugs regularly, but the problems that Pixel Piracy has run deeper than just bugs.
The game is not interested in explaining how anything works, those counting on a little guidance will be sorely disappointed. This isn’t always a problem, there are plenty of other games out there that do not hold your hand, but even those games lacking robust tutorial systems will generally manage to teach their mechanics in subtle ways by putting the player in a situation where they need to discover the basic skills needed to progress. I didn’t get any such feeling from Pixel Piracy. A lack of direction is one thing, but the cherry on top of this unexplained mess is its heinous user interface that really isn’t fit for human consumption.
Scourge of the # Seas!
Don’t Starve is a good example of a game that tells you very little but still manages to teach you its mechanics. The game starts and for the most part you have no direction or explanation. But interacting with the environment in Don’t Starve is so simple, you can figure it out naturally just by pressing buttons. You click on something, something happens, but the interface is never there to get in your way. It gives you all the information you need and pretty much immediately you have everything that you need to begin progressing through the game. Want to know what time it is? What you are carrying? What you can combine? It’s all there. By contrast, Pixel Piracy explains nothing to you, and will have you navigating through a myriad of menus just to accomplish the most basic tasks. Let’s take something as simple as setting sail: you need to open the menu, go to the world map. Select where you are going to, then click on set sail, close the menu. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but sailing is kind of central to the whole pirate game theme, and the game makes no effort to explain to you how it’s achieved. It’s the same story with everything else, leveling up, teaching your crew new skills, adding equipment, keeping them happy, and building your ship are all unexplained and tucked away into menus.
The complexity of the menus and the lack of any guidance gives the game an illusion of depth, but once you figure out how to play you slowly realize just how shallow and repetitive the experience is. In the promotional materials you see massive battle including huge crews, but you only really need about 4 or 5, since you can level them up to be death machines pretty easily. Your pirates are, in general, pretty much automated, so combat isn’t that interesting. Get to a ship or an island watch them bounce off the enemies until something dies. Any management to actually be done is elementary and its usually based around leveling up and managing food, equipment, and other minutiae. It’s frustrating having so little control over what your crew does. Want a dude to stop kicking turds around the ship and fish so you won’t starve? You can’t tell him to. The game boasts a “procedurally generated world that changes every time you play”. There are only three types of “encounters”: ship, town, and island. There are variations within these encounters, of course, but even then they all feel similar. This lack of variety quickly sucks the fun out of exploring, and just made it feel like more of a chore than anything else.
They Starved too, but because I run out of food
The core concepts of Pixel Piracy could have made for a sound game, but the bugs and lack of depth really hurt what’s being presented. This game definitely has an audience though, our own Jay, a known lover of pirates, expressed a more favorable opinion. If you need something to scratch a piracy itch then you can consider it. For everyone else, the recommendation is to skip this one. And if you are developer, man do you have an untapped market. If this can get a positive reaction just because its pirates, image how well you can do with a game that actually feels like it’s left early access.
