Frigato: Shadows of the Caribbean Preview

Frigato: Shadows of the Caribbean, a tactical stealth game from Mercat Games currently in Steam Early Access, is full of fantastic ideas. I absolutely adore the stealth genre, and it really works when combined with tactical gameplay. The pirate theming is, likewise, a perfect fit, offering a great variety of locations and a perfect explanation as to why stealth is so necessary. Frigato also throws in a variety of interesting characters that all play differently and a rather classic adventure storyline with plenty of roguish charm — combined with everything else, the project truly appears to shape up into something truly magical. Given that Mercat Games has also shown a willingness to consistently and frequently patch Frigato to fix its shortcomings and improve itself, I do truly think this title could be incredible when it leaves Early Access.

The trouble is: Frigato has an awfully long way to go. I don’t want this preview to read like a bug report, but I have pages of notes on how many ways things have just gone wrong. Characters and the background have a tendency to flicker uncontrollably or start glowing green; the models for the enemy soldiers will, at times, either be missing their red coats and just have a lot of blank space or be nothing but their red coats, just floating in the air; enemies will simply get stuck, either on each other or by their own threat detection, somehow; half of the achievements don’t unlock when they should; zooming out just becomes inexplicably impossible; the camera rotation can sometimes turn on the wrong axis; walls are easily moved through at random; and the vision cones will sometimes show areas where line-of-sight is partially disrupted as being safe spaces to sneak around in, but will then prove to be completely unsafe. That all isn’t even mentioning just how frequently the game can crash — I am not joking: Frigato can crash on the slightest action, like when a save loads, an enemy dies, or when you complete a level. For the most part, I do have confidence that Mercat Games can mend these bugs; the patch notes tell me that there’s been a lot of improvement already. Even so, I can’t say this hasn’t ruined the experience for me a tad. There are some fantastic features in here, on reflection, but my experience here was definitely plagued by these bugs.

That “brief” list of inarguable errors aside, I did mean what I said about there being some real potential here. On the surface, Frigato is a fairly by-the-numbers stealth game with a tactical twist. Each level involves figuring out how to get a small group of characters from one spot to another without being noticed, all in real time. The especially fun part is that each of the six characters (five of which appear in the current build) has a variety of different actions to use and even move differently, forcing the player to figure out how to combine the tools available to them in order to puzzle out a way past a variety of obstacles.

All five of the characters have two basic abilities that allow them to either kill or knock out an enemy right next to them — beyond that, everything is unique. Samuel, your basic pirate with a parrot on the shoulder and everything, seems to be the central character, hopeful that this odd journey will lead to the truth behind his father’s fate. He carries a knife that can be thrown a short, but respectable, distance to kill a foe, and he also has his faithful parrot, which can be sent out to distract people, forcing them to look in another direction for a time. This is a fantastic basic set of abilities that is nearly always useful.

Mary, described by Frigato’s description as a “pyromaniac”, has a slightly more volatile toolkit. She carries a limited amount of explosives that will slowly burn a small group of enemies to death, and she can also use magical shadows to temporarily stun a cone of people. Because the player can only control one character at a time, Mary’s explosives are one of the best ways to take out a group of soldiers that are close together. I did try to get some use out of her more shadowy ability since it seemed pretty interesting, but I found it to be no more useful than knocking out people one by one. Those she knocked out with it didn’t stay down any longer than usual, and Mary herself takes longer to finish her animation using the shadows. Throw in the fact that the ability itself can be a tad finicky, not wanting to activate unless Mary has a wide-open area ahead of her, and it quickly becomes more of a hassle to use it than not. If there were a way to more easily queue up multiple characters to tie up her victims, I could see this being very useful, but I just didn’t find any point where it wasn’t easier to knock people out one at a time. To finish off with an odd anecdote, I once had a very confounding experience in the second level where her shadows knocked out soldiers a good way away from where she was standing, which made tying everyone up before they woke up a fair bit more difficult.

Char Li, a monk who used to own an inn but left to seek out adventure, is a fair bit slower to move than the other characters, whether they are standing tall to be as fast as possible or crouching to sneak more easily. He brings to the table a much more useful way to temporarily disable a group of enemies: his drum. When he plays it, and for a brief period afterwards, the surrounding soldiers will uncontrollably dance, unable to see anything around them. Thankfully, once they’re finished, they will confusedly walk around, looking for disturbances, rather than immediately sounding an alarm. He can also throw a single bottle onto the ground, which will be picked up by the first soldier to see it, offering a fantastic way to move someone into a more advantageous position. Apparently, Mercat Games plans on incorporating various types of liquids to go into the bottle and have different effects, including one that will make an enemy fall asleep upon picking it up.

Next, the rather adorable pirate raccoon that appears throughout the description and the loading screen is the one, the only, Sir Deermouse. He is fairly unique in that, due to his small stature, he is always considered to be stealthed with no restriction to his movement speed, making him the fastest character by far. Unlike every other character, he can even run while remaining as sneaky as possible (or, as pawsible, one might say). The main trade-off in this is that he lacks the upper body strength to lift bodies, meaning that, unlike the rest of the cast, he is unable to drag knocked-out or deceased enemies away from prying eyes. Instead, he can either steal a soldier’s gun right out of their grasp or scream as loudly as a raccoon can to draw attention to his position. Combined with his potential for speed, being able to scream and then run away — either to lead a curious guard into a trap or to run past their original position unnoticed — can be exceptionally useful! The whole “stealing a gun” thing also sounds like it would be quite helpful on paper, but I found getting Sir Deermouse to actually fire the gun oddly difficult. I may have misunderstood something somewhere, but I couldn’t get him to consistently act the same way on different attempts, usually resulting in the gun-toting rodent running around and getting caught when I wanted him to blow away a soldier.

Lastly, there’s Atzi, a witch with a penchant for blood and bloodshed. Five times per level, she can lay down a trap that will kill the first foe that dares walk over it, which can be great if combined with one of the other characters that can direct an enemy’s attention or if she can quickly place a trap along someone’s regular patrol route. However, I had more fun with her other technique: a short-ranged instant dash that kills whoever’s at the end of Atzi’s path. As long as you’re careful about the noise, this can quickly speed up any attempt to take a soldier out with speed and stealth, and it also comes in handy when a path wouldn’t normally be traversable. I had a lot of fun in what is presently the last level having Atzi get around broken bridges and watery gaps with ease.

Speaking of those levels, there are five in the current build. Each of them was quite distinct on a visual front, ranging from a big ship that you must sneak deeper and deeper inside of to a temple with many buildings in the way. Even within the levels, there’s a lot of variety in the geography, and it’s easy to differentiate where you are from the other locales. The music worked great as well with the levels, offering a fine feeling of adventure and scratching that pirate music itch.

That being said, I personally was hoping for a bit more variety in the gameplay. The constant swapping out of characters certainly helped in that regard, but for the majority of my experience, it felt as though I was being asked to work through the same basic situation of getting past the same British soldiers with some different characters and abilities. However, there were a few notable bright spots. For one example, the last level in the jungle presented a wide and tangled area with snaking paths. I took a long time just planning out a route that would take me past the fewest number of soldiers, and I still had to change my plans partway through.

As another example, the ship level featured two other forms of enemies, including ordinary crew members, who were decidedly not on the lookout for pirates, but who could run to and alert the soldiers if they saw anyone, as well as mermaids, who sat in their bathtubs and entranced the soldiers around them. Notably, the mermaids couldn’t be harmed by anything other than Samuel’s knife, making for some interesting puzzle-solving for anyone who’d gotten used to the usual “sneak up, stab, drag away” formula. Admittedly, it also took me a couple of attempts before I realised that the ensorceled soldiers were completely immune to all damage, I wasn’t really sure what the mermaids were doing on the ship, and the other character present felt somewhat useless since Samuel had all of the needed tools, but it was great to see that the situation would be shaken up every so often, likely even more so in the full release.

I will also say, I am not entirely sure what to make of the story here. Going through Frigato’s description on Steam, I can see a relatively simple but well-thought-out and classic pirate story with secrets and trust issues abound. However, when playing the actual game itself, I had a hard time following anything beyond the bare bones basics of the trip the characters were taking: finding pieces of an artefact for a ritual of some sort. Frigato is certainly interested in telling a fun story — the twist at the end of the fifth level speaks to that quite well — but it has thus far struggled in placing all of the necessary story and character information in the experience itself. I anticipate that these deeper elements may become more fully formed closer to release, and I am excited to see what it will do with its plotline.

There’s a lot here to love and a lot that still very much needs work, but I am hopeful that Mercat Games will be able to deliver a fantastic final product. Personally, I don’t know if they’ll hit their projected half-year to exiting Early Access, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong if it means I get an amazing pirate-stealth game out of it. There are many plans ahead for the full release, including a greater focus on character relationships and a store that can be accessed between levels, so I’m sure that Frigato: Shadows of the Caribbean is sailing in the right direction.