The Pirate Queen with Lucy Liu

I LOVE this experience!! If you’re looking for a violent action game - this isn’t for you. If you’re looking for an experience where you feel like you’re stepping into a movie and being a badass pirate queen voiced by the amazing Lucy Liu - this is right up your alley. BUY IT! It’s fantastic!

The Pirate Queen takes the minimalism to the new level and not in the positive way. I love narrative-driven games and I'm all OK when it comes to trading gameplay for the story. There are tons of games out there where you just walk, talk and explore and many of these manage to keep you immersed throughout their whole duration. Unfortunately, The Pirate Queen does not fall anywhere near this category. The game is small (like, 3-hour small if you're up to finding all collectibles and getting all achievements). Nevertheless, it's divided into about twelve chapters. These miniature chapters heavily emphasize the scope of the product. Most chapters are bound to one room or a small-ish area and for the most part you just need to solve the obvious puzzle or just walk through the area to complete the chapter. The game employs (or at least attempts to) some popular VR mechanics (like climbing) but does it in a coarse and unrewarding way. Great storytelling could have easily made all the aspects mentioned above forgivable... but the storytelling here is minimalistic as well. There are no characters (at least, no character models), no cutscenes, no dialogs and no storytelling through the environment. Our protagonist just recites her story as we progress through the game. Also, the PCVR version of the game looks like a direct port from a standalone version. The visuals are just... minimalistic. The only thing that is an outstanding positive about The Pirate Queen is the great voice acting by Lucy Liu. Does it justify the purchase of an otherwise bleak product? I honestly don't think so, given the not-so-minimalistic price for this amount of content. 4/10

I'm really enjoying the game so far. The puzzles are interesting without being too challenging, which suits me as someone who likes exploring the very beautiful environment and picking up all of the historical objects, learning as I go, and so on. Lucy Liu's voice in my ear is great - her performance really adds to the overall atmosphere - and as someone interested in the period of history leading up to the Opium Wars, I'm glad to see that there's been so much research into the setting. It's also refreshing playing a pirate game that doesn't involve sword fighting and random violence - I like that I'm using my brain moreso than my brawn. Looking forward to seeing what's next for this studio!