Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

I went into Pirate's Curse expecting a modest portable-platformer port and came out the other side having quietly accepted it as one of the most carefully assembled 2D action games WayForward has ever shipped. The central hook is elegant in the way only a small team with real conviction can manage: Shantae has lost her genie powers, so instead of belly-dance transformations, her moveset now comes entirely from stolen pirate gear collected across a chain of cursed islands. Each piece of gear, a Flintlock Pistol that doubles as a switch-activator, a Pirate Hat that lets you glide on wind gusts, a Scimitar for downward block-smashing, Risky's Boots for a wall-breaking charge dash, and a mid-air Cannon jump, slots into your hands and stays there. The controls never ask you to pause and menu-swap mid-combat. That fluency is the thing fans of the series most often cite when arguing this is the series' high-water mark. The world structure sits somewhere between a traditional Metroidvania and a Zelda-style dungeon crawl. You arrive at an island, work toward a Den of Evil, claim a new gear piece, beat a boss, and sail on. It sounds mechanical written down, but each island feels genuinely distinct in visual theme and the puzzles are built tightly around whichever tool you just acquired. Backtracking exists, and the Pirate Flare warp item handles most of the tedium before it builds. Completionists hunting all 20 cursed Cacklebats for the good ending, or collecting 32 Heart Squids to expand the health bar, will squeeze another few hours on top of the roughly ten-hour main run. Clearing the game unlocks Pirate Mode, which hands you all gear from the start and is essentially a built-in speedrun sandbox. The soundtrack, composed by Jake Kaufman, is the kind of work where individual tracks map to specific rooms in your memory weeks later. Upbeat, slightly tropical, occasionally eerie in the darker dungeon stretches. It underlines the mood of each island rather than just filling space. The pixel artwork shares that intentionality: character sprites are clean and expressive, the boss designs are weird and memorable, and the high-resolution dialogue portraits give the cast genuine personality. The writing leans hard into self-referential humor and low-key absurdism, which carries stretches where the story itself is thin. Fair criticisms exist. The overall narrative arc is straightforward and the world, while charming, is less interconnected than a purist might want from the genre. A handful of players note that some background geometry can blend into platforms in ways that cause unfair deaths, and the island-hopping loop, while well-paced, does repeat its formula visibly by the midpoint. High-refresh-rate PC users should also note a documented framerate bug that makes the game run too fast above 60Hz, fixable via community guides but worth knowing before you start. None of these are dealbreakers, but they are real. For players who want a compact, handcrafted action-platformer that knows exactly what it is and executes without waste, Pirate's Curse delivers that with obvious care. First-timers to the series can jump in here without context. Veterans who skipped it at launch and went straight to Half-Genie Hero should probably circle back.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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