Flint: Treasure of Oblivion Review

While a pirate-themed setting is perfect for video games, titles that allow players to travel on the high seas in search of adventure and treasure are very difficult to come by nowadays. For this reason, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion by Savage Level caught the eye of more than a few players with its setting, story, and characters, as well as for its tactical gameplay, which combines a somewhat straightforward turn-based combat system with features lifted from trading card games, with a sprinkle of tabletop RPGs features on top, such as visible die rolls for attacks and defense.

While all of these features could have made for a very engaging experience, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion fails to deliver on most fronts. The foundation of a solid tactical role-playing game is definitely there, but the many issues of the experience prevent the game from being nothing more than an average and, more often than not, frustrating experience.

The story is definitely one of the best features of the game, if not the very best, mostly thanks to the main character, the legendary Golden Age pirate captain James Flint, who is also featured in a lot of pirate-themed novels, movies, and TV shows, such as Treasure Island by Rober Louis Stevenson. At the beginning of the game, the legendary pirate captain and his first mate, Billy Bones, manage to survive a shipwreck only to end up in a French island fort. A death sentence for their pirate activities is the only thing they have to look forward to. During their stay in the fort’s prison, however, the ever-resourceful Captain Flint not only manages to get a whiff of treasure but also to find a way out of prison, fighting against other not-so-well-mannered prisoners and bribing corrupt guards. After making their escape, Captain Flint and Billy Bones will put together their own crew in the town of Saint-Malo and eventually sail on what is an enjoyable yet too predictable pirate adventure.

While the plot of Flint: Treasure of Oblivion may be a little straightforward, it is quite engaging mainly thanks to Captain Flint, who is an amazing protagonist and the perfect embodiment of what a pirate captain should be. Bold, brash, unafraid of taking action, often of the unsavory, violent type, with a quip always on his tongue, seeing the legendary pirate in action is very amusing, as much as his interactions with other characters are. At the very start of the game, for example, while stranded at sea, James Flint attempts to eat his first mate, who is presumed dead and does not stop even when the man wakes up, very well alive.

Enhancing the adventures of pirate captain James Flint and his crew in Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is the way the story is presented. Doing away with the voice-acted cutscenes or the silent dialogue boxes seen in countless other games, developer Savage Level went with some gorgeous comic book panels that give the game a very peculiar visual novel feel that suits both the story and setting extremely well. It made the story so enjoyable that it would have made the flawed gameplay almost bearable, if there weren’t so many issues that made playing the game both a slog and incredibly frustrating.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the gameplay of Flint: Treasure of Oblivion. Its tactical turn-based combat, for example, is solid enough, and the card game mechanics are not a source of particular complication, as they essentially work as a regular skill and equipment system. Top-down exploration and traversal are not at all innovative, but they look functional in the context of this pirate adventure. What really breaks the game is the execution of these mechanics and the systems that power them.

Starting with combat, almost every one of its features and mechanics leaves something to be desired. The interface is too convoluted, requiring way too many clicks to perform the easiest of actions like moving, attacking, using skills, and switching characters. For example, after deciding to attack an enemy, you need to click on the enemy first and then on the dies that appear after the selection has been made. In addition, if, for some reason, you have spent one of the two APs to move and attempt to click on an enemy without selecting the attack option first, you may end up wasting an AP to perform a movement-based ability on the enemy, which can be used to knock down or push the enemy. This can be generally useful – if only the player is not performing these actions by mistake. The battlefields’ visual design also makes combat even worse, as the interface does a terrible job of highlighting if it is possible to traverse certain areas.

The combat issues in Flint: Treasure of Oblivion don’t stop at the poor interface. Besides the aforementioned traditional AP system, which grants two actions per turn per character, the game features a morale system that influences attack and defense rolls, a skill system, and an equipment system powered by cards. These systems are poorly explained by some very unexhaustive in-game tutorials that only manage to create more confusion. For example, I’m still not sure what truly influences the morale level for both player and enemy or the calculations that go into the die rolls. As a result, combat feels like it’s purely dominated by RNG (random number generation).

Animations are also stiff and very basic, and sound effects are barely audible, which contributes to the overall failure to convey the visceral feel of pirates fighting for treasure and often for their own lives. Leveling up characters is just as needlessly convoluted as fighting enemies, as to improve characters’ stats, the player must first share the bounty in a dedicated menu, then head over to the stats menu and pick which stat to increase. With so many games handling all of these features in a much better way, I was truly baffled at how Flint: Treasure of Oblivion fumbles so much in this regard.

Exploration and traversal don’t fare much better. Besides being as straightforward as they appear, they suffer due to the confusing design of several locations, a map system that doesn’t help players get their own bearings that much, and a bad camera that cannot be rotated during exploration. This feels like a major oversight, considering it is possible to do so during combat, although in a very clunky way.

What really makes Flint: Treasure of Oblivion very frustrating to play, however, are the controls. No matter if you’re using a controller or keyboard and mouse, you are going to run into issues, and to reduce them, I essentially had to play with both. During exploration, for example, controllers work better, as you can directly control James Flint as if it were any old top-down game. With mouse and keyboard controls, however, the game is controlled as an old-school RPG, meaning that you have to click to get the characters to move towards any given location. The annoying clicking sound is the least of the problems here, as characters sometimes get stuck, and it is not possible to scroll the scene, as characters always need to be on camera.

In battles, on the other hand, using a controller led to one of the most frustrating gaming experiences I had all year. Selecting a hexagon becomes a challenge, as is doing pretty much everything else except speeding up the enemy turn due to a combination of imprecise controls and the poor design of the interface, which is the same no matter which control type the player is using. As such, I had to switch to mouse and keyboard controls during combat, which work reasonably well, even with the poor interface. In the end, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is possibly the only game on PC that has to be played with both a controller and mouse and keyboard for an “optimal” experience that still leaves something to be desired. Console players, on the other hand, won’t have the luxury of multiple control options and will suffer from these issues the most.

Amidst all these issues, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion at least runs decently, at the very least. While the available graphics options are limited to a generic graphics setting, resolution, and framerate cap, with no support for any upscaler, the simple and not particularly detailed locations shouldn’t be too demanding for most system configurations. On my machine (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM), the game ran at an average of 80 FPS  at 4K resolution, high settings in most scenarios, so I expect even dated systems to run the game well at lower resolutions and settings.

Flint: Treasure of Oblivion has the foundation of a solid tactical role-playing game, but the game clearly needed more time in the oven to work out its many issues. As things stand at launch, however, it is only an average, often frustrating experience that is barely salvaged by the short 10-hour-long story, charming protagonist, and comic-book style presentation.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

5

WCCFTECH RATING

Flint: Treasure of Oblivion