Flint: Treasure of Oblivion review

Generally speaking, I’m partial to a bit of pirate fiction. The Golden Age of Piracy in particular is a wealth of (mostly overblown) tall tales about adventures and derring-do on the high seas. And one of the most famous and well-remembered works is Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale of Captain James Flint and his compatriots Billy Bones and Long John Silver. Flint: Treasures of Oblivion starts a little while before Flint’s better known adventure, and starts with him and Billy gathering a crew to go after another infamous treasure.

An isometric turn-based RPG, Treasure of Oblivion mixes free exploration with grid-based combat, and, later, some light crew management. By far and away though, most of your time will be spent exploring contained areas, rummaging for useful items, fighting and role playing. There’s nothing here that’s as in-depth as, say, Baldur’s Gate 3, but you’ll make choices throughout that affect the immediate situation if not the greater story.

Characterisation is kept pretty much to a minimum, to be fair. These guys are pirates and there isn’t much room for anyone to grow or develop. You’re motivated mostly by greed and self-interest, which keeps deep introspective moments to a minimum. Instead, you’ll usually just be fighting and stealing. And look, while the former is simple enough, the latter is just a bit too convoluted for me.

As is the trend nowadays, there are visible dice that rattle and roll when you select an action in combat. Unfortunately, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion does a fairly poor job of explaining what all the dice mean or stand for. Sometimes a low number will be a success, sometimes you’ll get a symbol instead of a number. Sometimes you’ll get a combination, sometimes there’ll be two or three dice, of different shapes and colours – and reroll tokens are in abundance so you can often mulligan multiple times anyway.

I’m sure somewhere the game explains what they all mean, but as you never see what the target roll is, it feels like a pointless gimmick included because Baldur’s Gate 3 made it feel like the “done thing”. It robs Flint of some credibility in some ways, because it feels so tacked-on. I don’t need to see dice rolling to know if I’ve hit an enemy when I don’t know what I’m rolling for or have any control over how or what I roll. It’s just showing me the RNG under the hood and there’s no need to.

There’s an also issue with having simply too many options you won’t use. Yes, you can push, pull, and drop down on your enemies, but they cost the same action points as an attack and are rarely the better option. If anything, the best tactic is to shoot as many enemies as possible before they get into range. You can buff characters with some of Flint’s abilities, but there’s little in the way of character synergy.

Arguably, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion also misses a trick by not allowing you to actually go out and sail the seas. At no point do you set sail for distant lands, or engage in ship combat, which just seems like a massive missed opportunity to me. While the environments are very impressive visually, not allowing us to get out and feel the sea breeze in our beards is a bit of a strange choice.

That being said, I did enjoy the campaign. Despite being a bit cliched, Flint, Billy and crew are an entertaining lot, even dropping the odd pop culture reference that may seem a bit jarring but is always amusing. And you’ll always have something to loot or unlock, even if the lack of a map makes navigation something of a chore. These are pirates, for goodness’ sake – pirates have maps!

Regardless, there’s a decent adventure game here for those craving an CRPG without so much of the complexity found in some larger titles. It lacks some simple features that would make it much better and contains some that just feel like they were added out of obligation, but Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is still a good-looking, inoffensive swashbuckling adventure with enough pilfering, parrots and peg-legs to pacify all the pirate purists out there.