- Table of Contents
Intro
Sweet Baby Inc has been involved with quite a few video games in recent history, many of which are objectively bad or have bad components as a direct result of this involvement. The company’s CEO also left a sour taste in many people’s mouths by promoting bullying tactics to force studios into collaboration.
Consequently, a lot of backlash came their way and a Steam curator named “Sweet Baby Inc detected” marked all the games on Valve’s platform that SBI worked on. Soon after, all these games started seeing waves of negative reviews and while I’m not opposed to some of them, the review bombing of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew rubbed me the wrong way.
What is Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew and who are Mimimi Games
Stealth tactics genre was highly successful in late ’90s and early 2000s thanks to the likes of Commandos and Desperados series but then it was largely forgotten for over a decade until late 2016 when Mimimi Games came seemingly out of nowhere and released Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.
Mimimi didn’t stop there, they revived the stealth tactics genre singlehandedly with additional titles releasing in pretty short intervals.
“I’m a huge, huge Commandos and Desperados fan myself. I think that’s one of the main reasons and I was always wondering if it’s not about the genre being unpopular. It was more that it didn’t exist at the time. So I was like, “This can’t be it and there must be somebody else that still loves such gameplay ideas” and yeah, I think we got lucky with it and executed a quite good game, so it was a really personal belief and taste.
There was also something that convinced publishers at that time. It was a period when all the games were easy and then Dark Souls came and everybody was like “Oh, we can make hard games again?” so that was something we used to convince the publishers back then but it was really hard to find a publisher for Shadow Tactics and Daedalic were the cool guys that believed in our ideas.” ~Dominik Abé on decisions behind Shadow Tactics development in an interview with AltChar.
From everything shown since the studio’s beginning, it is obvious Mimi folks were working on passion projects that delighted fans all over the world. Unfortunately, it turned out Shadow Gambit would be the studio’s last game before it went under but at least it was loved by almost everyone who played it. Until recently, the game held 96% positive reviews on Steam but since the SBI drama started, it went down by 2% in about the same number of weeks, changing the rating from Overwhelmingly Positive to Very Positive.
Why Shadow Gambit shouldn’t be enveloped in SBI controversy
Pretty much all games that had Sweet Baby Inc attached to them were review bombed over the past few weeks. It is great to have a way to let gamers voice their frustration with the likes of a megalomaniacal narcissist apparently admiring someone else but unfortunately, innocent bystanders can get caught in crossfire in such occasions.
Shadow Gambit is the bystander here since it was one of the games “Sweet Baby Inc detected” flagged with the company’s involvement. If you take a quick glance over the rest of the list, you can see it’s filled to the brim with absolute winners like D&D: Dark Alliance, Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad. This could lead you to believe Shadow Gambit is also full nonsense and lacks quality but that is far from the truth.
The aforementioned 96% positive reviews didn’t spontaneously materialize on their own. Mimimi Games didn’t hike up the price just to attempt to solve their financial issues and released the title at just $40 even if it was better in all aspects and included more content than many modern $60 and $70 releases. It was one of the rare occasions where critics and audience shared an opinion and the opinion was that Shadow Gambit is a genuinely good game.
SBI involvement was minimal
With the game’s decent writing, one would have to wonder if there is a glitch in the matrix. How come SBI is credited with working on the game and Afia Manicato didn’t end up worshipping white supremacists? That’s because SBI didn’t do the writing. Their involvement was minimal and limited to “Sensitivity Check”.
Sensitivity Check may sound odd for an outside observer but since it’s not about the game’s audio, we can safely rule out microphone inspections. As part of the “PR & Marketing Support”, the “Sensitivity Check” refers to inspecting the game’s themes in order to make sure it will not be offensive. Considering this is a fantasy game about supernatural pirates on a supernatural ship looking for treasure, one would have to go a ridiculously long length to find something to be offended by.
In any case, the connection Shadow Gambit has with SBI is very loose but unfortunately, it was enough to bring many unwarranted negative reviews that I sincerely hope will be drowned out by the positive ones.
Mimimi poured passion and sacrifice into making these games, delighted countless people all over the globe and closed down without raising the price of their final game despite the impending closure. Showering their final product with negative reviews is not the way to honor the memory of a studio that was a force for good in the gaming industry.
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