Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is an isometric RPG featuring a turn-based strategic combat system, developed by Savage Level and published by Microids. Releasing on December 17, 2024, for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows, the game dives into the golden age of piracy, offering players a chance to join the legendary Captain Flint on a quest for wealth and glory. In the treacherous world of high seas and perfidious people, only the brave and cunning pirate can find all hidden treasures and discover the ancient secrets.
Combining board game-inspired mechanics with classic RPG gameplay, Flint aims to offer a fresh spin on the genre. Promising a mix of strategic challenges, narrative depth, and a historically accurate pirate-themed setting, this title sets its sights on delivering a standout adventure. Will it live up to its ambitious premise, or will it struggle to find its treasure?
Everyone should find these answers by themselves, but let’s have a sneak peek into the game together. This is our Flint: Treasure of Oblivion PC review.
Flint: Treasure of Oblivion throws us straight into the hardships of sea dog life at the very beginning. Everything is lost. The captain, with no ship or crew, struggles to survive on a small piece of wood when the only food left is the first mate and a few seagulls.
The story could have ended here, but Flint is ready to make a hard decision for survival. However, fate intervenes, preventing Flint from crossing the final threshold. One challenging life phase transitions into another, snatching away the captain’s final possession—freedom.
At the start, the story seems to be pretty simple and straightforward, but as the events unfold, there is much more to it than a simple pirate life. Nevertheless, what truly keeps you entertained is the way the game delivers the narrative. Every story-relevant dialogue presented as a comic strip, with a nice, almost classical comic book art style.
The characters are drawn in great detail, and expressions, along with nice pirate-like lines, turn the boring unvoiced chatter into an entertaining experience.
It’s booty time.
Through the pictures and dialogues, the authors manage to express the unique traits of every relevant NPC, and it’s hard to stay indifferent to their fates. The best example is the captain Flint himself, who is presented as a charismatic bastard with his own sometimes questionable morals and principles. Yes, since it’s a pirate game, no one should expect a goody-two-shoes protagonist. Flint isn’t pure evil or a chauvinist; on the contrary, he is a gentleman, yet he won’t hesitate when a wholesale murder or a petty crime can benefit his goals.
The atmosphere of Flint: Treasure of Oblivion perfectly complements its narrative, which combines a slightly grave tone with shades of dark humor. From the grimy streets of a French city to a forsaken prison and luxurious ships, every element is crafted with care and a keen eye for detail. While the 3D models are not overly intricate high-poly designs, they adhere to a cohesive artistic vision that captures the historical essence of the pirate era.
The game’s visual style draws comparisons to titles like Divinity: Original Sin or Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, yet Flint stands apart with its distinct flair and character. The game brings a vibrant yet gritty pirate world to life, blending historical textures with a uniquely imaginative twist. This aesthetic bridges realism and stylization, ensuring the visuals are immersive and don’t create dissonance with the setting.
The music is a fine addition to the game’s style, perfectly capturing the spirit of a pirate age with a moving and unobtrusive score. Standing on the streets and listening to the BGM track is one of the activities to do, and it doesn’t get annoying even after several dozen loops. However, the other SFX effects leave much to be desired. With the music setting the high bar, the other sound effects make the sound design a bit less cohesive and could use some improvement.
Men die all the time.
In terms of exploration gameplay, Flint can’t offer too much. Moving the character with a mouse cursor, the player explores locations that are relatively small in scale. There are not many hidden items, and there are no secret paths or puzzles in general. Generally, the whole exploration is reduced to walking around and waiting for an attention mark to pop up. Though every now and then, a mastery check is triggered, it’s just a dice roll while none of the character’s skills or traits seems to matter, turning it into pure randomness.
Items, artifacts, and even crew members in Flint: Treasure of Oblivion are represented as collectible cards, adding a flavor of TCG or tabletop game to the experience. The whole team and equipment setup look like deck building, which might seem overly complicated at first glance.
To figure out what everything does here, I had to spend quite a lot of time reading card descriptions and thinking about how it would work in the battle. It’s clearly a board game thing where hours are needed to figure out the guidebook and learn a bare minimum to start playing properly. The game gives some hints as a tutorial, but sometimes it feels like not enough.
In the crew window, the characters are divided into rows of classes with specific abilities, while each class has up to three representatives. Thus there are plenty of characters to choose from. However, half of them are completely irrelevant and play the role of consumables in the battle. Those who die disappear permanently, unless there is a healer in the squad, but even so not all of the fallen can turn back to the crew.
The combat system is where the game gets to the point and tries to show off as a ground-moving representative of the genre, and at first it manages to surprise the player. As soon as the battle starts, the dice are rolled at every move. Each turn is a set of moves and attacks that ends with a dice roll or two, and half of the events are completely random. However, after finishing the tutorial battles and reaching more serious combats, a touch of novelty disappears, and every fight gets a bit tiring.
Random rules the ball here, and sometimes it’s easier to restart the battle, hoping for better rolls than waiting for the inevitable game over. Switching the action mode between two types is mostly the only thing that is possible to control aside from choosing a target. You can try to push your opponent, but the dice rolls and the character simply stumbles on the spot, falling out of the combat until the next turn. Characters can miss a shot even when the enemy stands at the tip of the gun, and these things can get fairly frustrating.
The only right tactic that exists is to try pushing enemies and hoping the random works and they fall down; if not, in most of the cases, the battle can be restarted right away. Either the random is cruel, or its sequences work wrong; half of the time, it’s hard to figure out why the attack doesn’t reach the target even though points look well enough and are marked green. The dice can be updated for each character, the change form and signs on them, but it doesn’t seem to improve the situation too much. Perhaps the answer why it happens is hidden in the guidebook, but at this point it is already too much for an average player who came to have fun with pirates and not read tons of texts.
The bright side of the combat system is the role of the environment there. The high ground really matters since it’s possible to jump at the opponent and knock them out or drop a barrel and kill them on the spot. The usage of random objects really adds more tactics and control over the situation since the godly barrel doesn’t need a die to strike, but the choice of the items is limited, and not every battlefield has them.
Another big issue the game has is optimization. With relatively low system requirements listed by the developers, it performs poorly even on higher-spec systems. Having several LOD presets, the game can improve the performance with lower settings, yet there still remain the issues with particle effects like rain. Absence of a VSync option can lead to the lines on the screen, and there won’t be any way to get rid of them but hoping that some third-party program can do the magic and fix it. Of course, not everyone will face this problem, but such moments should be taken into account to improve players’ experience and impression.
Sadly, visual bugs and performance issues are not the only problems. Sometimes the game can throw a critical error, yet it’s still not the worst thing to happen. Since there is no manual saving, autosaves are created at special points by themselves, and it happens relatively often. Thus when the bug occurs, there is no chance to load an older save where it didn’t happen yet. I had to start the game from scratch because the plot-relevant NPC didn’t spawn on the scene. Gladly, it did not happen in the middle of the game, and I could spare a few more hours to replaying. Hopefully the future hotfixes and patches can fix it soon.
Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is certainly an interesting attempt to create an engaging RPG experience, both in gameplay and the rare setting for this genre. Board game enthusiasts can find this game worth playing, yet more casual RPG players might be turned off by its complicated battle and deck building, spiced by the amount of randomness. Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is a one-time run for the mysteries of the plot, while the gameplay might not be entertaining enough to wade through it to see the finale.
Note: the Steam key was provided for free for the purposes of this review.
