Who among us hasn't heard the tale of Captain Blood, the seafaring scoundrel who—according to the press release I'm looking at—was "the most manly pirate captain ever to drink grog while romancing maidens across the Spanish main?" Well, presumably most of us, because the last time anyone saw his game was in 2010 before it disappeared and went into indefinite development hiatus. But fear not, buccaneers and privateers: Standing proudly alongside Skull & Bones as the heralds of a growing trend of pirate games narrowly escaping development purgatory, Captain Blood will soon set sail, again, for the first time. Captain Blood's development has been picked up, dusted off, and retrofitted for current-day release by SNEG , a publisher focused on reviving abandoned, overlooked, or unmodernized games from earlier eras.
Watching the announcement trailer , you can definitely feel the 2010 energy. It's a charming, hack-and-slash glimpse of an earlier, simpler time, when more dudes in videogames were still shaped with Todd McFarlane proportions. Captain Blood himself kind of looks like if Kratos was a pretty, pony-tailed pirate instead of a Spartan with a ghostly pallor, and he seems to wield cutlasses, flintlock pistols, and the occasional battle-axe with a similar vigor.
The game's look has an exaggerated, stylized bent to it—there's a chunkiness to the sabers and pistols that feels like a real throwback to a time when Blizzard's WoW aesthetic was somewhere close to its peak influe.
