In the end I still feel like the legend of Cheng Shih, the Pirate Queen, deserved a grander telling than this brief experience provides
I was excited to try The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend on my Meta Quest 3. The game tells the story of Cheng Shih, a female Chinese pirate who rose to become one of the most powerful pirates in history during the 18th century. However, after playing and completing the relatively short experience, I found it to be somewhat of a missed opportunity that failed to truly capture Cheng Shih's intriguing and riveting story or deliver compelling gameplay.
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The game places you in the role of Cheng Shih as it recounts a single pivotal night early in her career. Through Lucy Liu's talented voice performance, Cheng Shih's drive and ambition comes through as she works to gain control of the pirate fleet following her husband's death.
Unfortunately, the story itself feels disjointed and kinda incomplete. Rather than span Cheng Shih's full rise to power over many years, the narrative focuses only on this single night and lacks important historical context. Key events are kinda glossed over as you only watch them unfold via some beautiful and stylized animations in different scrolls you will find accross the ships you'll explore. As a result, you never get a real sense of who Cheng Shih was and what made her actually legendary. The narrative struggles to engage or excite as it attempts to condense her story into a short experience.
Gameplay is also shallow. As Cheng Sih, you move between ships using a canoe, solving occasional light puzzles by interacting with objects and finding "hidden" collectibles. However, these moments feel more like interruptions from the story rather than truly engaging gameplay. Puzzles are simplistic, rarely providing any challenge whatsoever. Think simple "slot a thing into a clearly marked place" and "turn a series of cranks to open a path" types of puzzles.
There are some short rope climbing sequences that break up the pace, but unfortunately there's no combat whatsoever. Even a sequence like protecting your pirate ship against other ships by firing cannons, that sounds really exciting on paper, the execution here is as excting as watching paint dry. The only, I would say, creative puzzle was one where I had to beat a drum to the sounds of thunder and lightning. I wish there were more special moments like that in this 2 hours-ish experience.
While I really appreciated Lucy Liu's voice performance, The Pirate Queen ultimately tells only a small piece of Cheng Shih's history without delivering compelling narrative or gameplay. For those curious about her story, it may still be worth experiencing briefly, but in the end I still feel like the legend of Cheng Shih, the Pirate Queen, deserved a grander telling than this brief experience provides. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 via a promo code provided by the publisher. The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is available now on Meta Quest and SteamVR.
