Curse of Pirates

My first few runs in Curse of Pirates felt immediately familiar in the best sense, that warm recognition you get when a small studio has clearly done its homework. Funky Parrot, three people working on their debut title, has built a Vampire Survivors-adjacent auto-combat roguelite around a high-seas theme that actually earns its setting rather than just painting cannons over a generic horde-survivor template. You pilot a ship across cursed waters, enemy waves swell and compound, and every run you're picking from a pool of 28 skills to snap together a build that suits your rhythm. Want to rain fire from a distance? There are skills for that. Prefer summoning abyss-touched chaos in close quarters? Zar'Kul, a crew recruit described as a literal spawn of the deep, has opinions about that approach too. The crew system is where the game starts to separate itself from the crowded auto-battler shelf. Each companion comes with a distinct personality and a dedicated skill pool that overlays your captain's own options, meaning your build decisions are partly about who you've brought aboard, not just which upgrades appeared in the loot roll. The terrain manipulation mechanic is the most intriguing wrinkle in the design. Ancient treasure maps let you add or remove elements on the battlefield mid-run, which shifts from pure reaction gameplay into something with a little more spatial thinking. It is a modest tactical layer, but it signals that the developers are thinking past the basic genre loop. The enemy roster in Early Access includes sea monsters, undead corsairs, nightmarish beasts, and at the boss tier you have the Vice Admiral and the Kraken waiting to end your ambitions. Five quest types, ranging from treasure hunts to bounty chases, keep individual runs from feeling like identical sessions. The Early Access caveat deserves honest airtime. The studio has acknowledged that two earlier playtests exposed real balance and engagement problems, and they are using community feedback to iterate. The current build sits at around 85 percent positive on Steam from roughly 60 reviews, which is an encouraging signal for a game barely a month old, but the review pool is small and the design is still moving. Version 1.0 is planned to add more playable ships, each with distinct passives, additional crew characters with their own skill pools, new bosses, and a completed main story. That is a meaningful roadmap, which also means today's build is genuinely incomplete. If you need a polished product right now, the honest answer is to wishlist it and check back. If you enjoy riding the Early Access wave for a genre you love and the idea of a crew-driven, terrain-tweaking survivor roguelite sounds like your kind of chaos, the foundation here is more thoughtful than the genre average. The pixel art carries a dark nautical atmosphere that pairs well with the subject matter, and reports of a shanty playing through the launch trailer suggest the audio direction has personality. For a debut from a three-person team, the craft-to-ambition ratio feels calibrated rather than overreached. This is the kind of small, attentive project I find myself quietly rooting for.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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