Riding the hype wave to create your own, erm, “spin” on a hot property is nothing new in media. Terribad moviemakers The Asylum built their foundations on copying Hollywood movies on a shoestring budget with slightly different names to confuse your grandmother.
Movies like Transmorphers (Transformers), Almighty Thor (Thor), Alien vs. Hunter (AVP) and even Titanic 2 could never be called classics, but just in the same way that The Room has a devoted following despite by all accounts being an incomprehensible mess, The Asylum’s output has its own fair share of devotees.
Sadly, there’s nothing that falls under the same bracket of so-bad-it’s-good in terms of video games. Until now.
With the Xbox One’s much-anticipated Sea of Thieves out next month, one developer has taken it upon themselves to deliver their alternative vision for the impatient. Thief of Seas, despite the name, unfortunately doesn’t feature a cloaked man trying to stuff the Atlantic into his backpocket, but instead revolves around a pirate’s attempts to save a princess from ghosts. I have to let you know right now that these are some powerful ghosts.
Once the princess has disappeared, it’s up to our crudely animated pirate to save her with absolutely no direction whatsoever. And so began my twenty minute quest across Thief of Seas’ lifeless, humdrum world to find her with the occasional dialogue hint and, I guess what you could call fights? Combat is as simple as holding down X; it may look like you’re blocking, but apparently not. The skeletons you come up against have this wonderful habit of running around in circles and not doing anything, just like me in my early twenties.
Finding the princess involves your wide-gaited friend randomly strolling around and unconvincingly swimming to new islands, that is unless he gets stuck on the scenery and you have to reset yourself right back to the starting area. In an interesting twist, there is no pause menu — it’s just a list of the controls. I don’t know why you would even want to pause such a high-octane ride, though.
For an unknown reason, coins are dotted around Thief of Seas’ tiny map — I do not know or want to know what happens once you get them all. I love a backflipping, karate kicking pirate as much as the next guy, but the pirate’s mission is to important to waste on such trivial pursuits.
No Unity game works flawlessly on console, and Thief of Seas is no different. Our unnamed pirate boi loves to get stuck on random objects while the framerate threatens to collapse in on itself. Other choice highlights include randomly trying to climb along thin air and swimming along as if you’re just sort of gliding through water.
Eventually, you reach the castle where you are told the princess should be, but in a shocking twist, she is not. Instead, your task is to morph into a pirate ship and start blowing up other ships while Amazing Grace on bagpipes starts playing. Once you have wept your way through such a soaring rendition of royalty-free emotion, the princess is saved and then that’s that. You continue to float along at sea with nothing left to do but be alone with your thoughts. The thoughts that keep you awake, those that taunt you, make you doubt yourself, the ones that threaten to make you en–
After I had reached the zenith that Thief of Seas offered, I decided to find out more about Archor Games, who also go by Echs Bachs because Xbox. Once their flat HTML site loaded, my suspicions that they were the gaming equivalent of The Asylum were solidified. Just some of their hits include Granny Theft Auto, Legend of Melba and The Simps, which is absolutely my favourite. No matter what you think of their games, they’ve made a career out of basically shitposting — you have to respect that.
I picked up Thief of Seas for just 19p from the Xbox Store, tucked away in one of the deals. That works out at roughly 1p per minute of entertainment. Unless you can find nineteen penny sweets and then make your own demented claymation-esque version of Sea of Thieves, I don’t think you will find better value for money.
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