Flint: Treasures of Oblivion Review - Beauty Over Gameplay
After the disappointment brought on by a certain other piracy-based game released last year, I thought perhaps “Flint: Treasure of Oblivion” would sate my lust for mayhem and looting on the high seas while scratching the itch for some ship-based shenanigans with its tactical combat. Taking on the role of a longstanding fictional pirate, Captain James Flint, you set out to escape from prison, find a ship and set sail for buried treasure. Unfortunately, while Flint does look pretty, there are far too many issues that hampered my ability to enjoy the feeling of living the pirate life.

Developers Savage Level have put a lot of time and effort into making Flint look good. Every location is filled with little details that help bring the world to life, from barrels, containers bottles and other bits and pieces that make the world look lived in, flowers left at the base of a shrine to honour those past, and debris scattered amongst the jungle after being washed ashore. The game consists of a cel-shaded style artwork, with the narrative presented to the player in the style of a graphic novel instead of the traditional animated cutscenes. One thing I specifically want to praise is the lighting effects present throughout the whole game. Whether skulking around the darkened French city of Saint-Malo or trekking through the jungles of the Americas while shafts of light beam through the jungle canopy above, the lighting in this game helps to give the environments more depth and bring the world to life as you journey through them.
I also want to commend the developers for their treatment of both the enemies and Captain Flint’s pirate crew. Every NPC character, whether friend or foe, will have their own name and portrait display when interacting with or making their moves. Far too often we see games that have generic designs for enemies, where the enemies of each class all look identical. There is some degree of this in the game, at one point you are boarding an English slave ship full of redcoats, so, of course, everyone except the leader and second in command all look similar. For the crew and many other enemies encountered during your journey, their clothing is different, giving an air of individuality to the different members of your crew.


Despite how great the game looks multiple issues prevent Flint from being as good as it could be, and these issues all come down to development choices and a distinct lack of information presented to the player in an easy-to-digest format. The combat and levelling have multiple systems that build upon each other, and yet, these are not natively intuitive to the player. The developers knew that these complex systems would be confusing to players, so they included an easy-to-access rule set, with loading screens directing you to look at them to make the most of your playing experience. Between the different categories within the rule set, there are 33 different screens for you to attempt to absorb before jumping back out. While it is beneficial to include the rule set, I cannot understand why they would not make it so that the players could see the information while they are playing the game. It would be so much easier to understand if there was a little pop-up that could be triggered to provide succinct information rather than having to scroll back through the rule set.
What I would probably consider the most painful part of the experience comes from the combat and levelling system. The turn-based combat is separated into movement and attack controls. If you want to move your character, then the movement stance allows you to select where you want to go and how you can interact with the environment. This may be as simple as jumping off a box, but it also has combat benefits, allowing you to roll a barrel into an enemy or tackle an enemy to the ground to make them more vulnerable. If you wish to attack, the attack stance allows you to attack with your current weapons or as a last resort, attack with your fists.

After a while, you do get the hang of the controls but in the early parts of the game, I felt frustrated with this control system. The stances do not return to a default stance when you change characters, making it far too easy to select your next character and accidentally have them attempt to tackle an enemy instead of stabbing them with a sword or vice versa. It feels like the type of situation where the controls could be a lot more intuitive, with the player able to click on an enemy and then click to either tackle or attack.
As you journey through the game you do not earn experience points for your characters. The pirate life is all about the loot to be plundered and shared amongst the crew and this concept is put into play in Flint and I think it fits in well with the pirate motif. Where the faults lie is in the execution, with no way to automatically level up the characters. In the early parts of the game when you only have a small crew it is not too hard to manage the process but once you have a full crew it can be a chore to go through and manually level up every crew member, especially when we are talking over twenty different characters.


All of these issues are just compounded by a limited amount of weapons available for your crew, because I am sure there were plenty of pirates who didn’t carry a sword, let alone a knife with them at all times, a limited ability to heal wounds that lower stats, the constant possibility of a weapon to break on any attack roll even though it will be fine in a fight a few minutes later and a far too heavy reliance on RNG that can result in having to restart the same fight multiple times just to get through the first round of combat without a necessary character dying.
While the team at Savage Level are to be applauded for the art design and care they put into creating this pirate world, it is vastly overshadowed by the complex systems and heavy reliance on luck in combat for me to recommend to anyone except the most die-hard fans of the genre or the pirate setting.

Flint: Treasure of Oblivion was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.