One of my favorite recent games
You start by assembling a crew, and that in itself is quite an unique experience. At first you have 4 captains, but as you play with other characters, they are also unlocked for that role. Each character brings an unique benefit from being captain, ranging from very useful to fairly situational. There are three very viable paths to build you crew around, with them being Friendly, Devious and Aggressive. It might seem strange to be able to fight the same battles with a friendly alignment as you would with an aggressive one, but this is exactly the charm of the game. The textual outcome of encounters describes how the enemy reacted to your attitude, giving a sense of cohesion to the plot.
There are many systems and subsystems happening in parallel, but they all pretty much feed into each other. So for example, the diverse skill pool of your characters gets supplemented by treasures found on the map, training they may receive in towns, and research that can be done inbetween missions, and vice-versa.
The game is quite replayable, as each crew will face the same challenges in a different way. It is perfectly possible to come back to a scene you've been to before and find a completely different outcome due to having another set of skills and personalities at hand.
The game also offers two very distinct modes, Discovery and Adventure. I spent almost all of my time on Discovery, which allows you to save at any time and peruse options at your own pace, also being able to negate a very unlucky skill roll, because those will happen... you have a 97% chance to accomplish a task and it fails. You just reload. That is not an option in Adventure mode, which is the original mode and the hardcore option, I guess. Back when I had infinite time for games that might have been an option, but I'm perfectly happy with Discovery.
It is charming, it is unique, and it is a good investment of your money. Recommended!
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