Hyper Light Drifter is a very good game and I totally forgot about the eldritch monsters in it! For some reason I always think of it as a sci-fi game even though it’s mostly about a dying/dead civilization with very little sci-fi.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

I enjoyed the combat in Mark of the Deep. You have a light attack, a heavy attack, and a gun. Ammo for the gun is refilled with successful melee attacks. I think the light attack is a little too light (it takes too many hits to defeat an enemy) but the heavy attack actually swings through enemies so I used that constantly.

Thanks for the warning on Death’s Door. It’s currently 80% off during the steam summer sale so I’ve been tempted, but I just don’t know if I’d enjoy it. I can honestly put up with most games if I’m enjoying the aesthetic/artwork but it’s hard for me to care when I don’t enjoy the aesthetic.

And I have actually played Tunic for a couple hours. It’s very well-made but I set it down for like a month and now I have no idea where I was or what I was doing. I should probably just wander around that world some more…

First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.

Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there’s an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can’t sit through) yet you can’t really make a “righteous pirate” character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of “bad guys”, if they were present at all. There just wasn’t a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.

And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I’ll say ‘the zeitgeist’ even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as “outlaws glorified for living by their own code”. And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don’t even have a label. That’s a weird realization for me.

The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre.

See, this is crazy to me. I can’t believe that the Weird West genre has been around since the 1950s and yet an equivalent “weird pirates” genre wasn’t created until 2003 by Disney! But I can’t think of a single work prior to that which fits the description. I know Weird West isn’t a huge genre, but I was able to come up with at least 50 posts for !weirdwest@lemmy.zip . It’s so weird for an equivalent pirate genre to have what, 5 entries? I feel like there must be more out there and I just can’t find them. This isn’t like, say, the creation of cyberpunk, which couldn’t really be created until after computers existed; pirates and zombie stories have been around for centuries and yet they were never brought together??

Sorry, I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, I just wanted to go on a rant of disbelief. I made this post because I felt like I was missing something but you just confirmed I really wasn’t.

Exactly, One Piece and Peter Pan are perfect examples of “pirate fantasy” but are missing that lawless aspect which (in my opinion) drives the romantic view of pirates (and the Wild West). Or maybe not “lawlessness” but the “living by their own code” aspect of it.

It’s strange how dark/light fantasy shouldn’t have any impact on whether the lawlessness of pirates is glorified, yet it seems to work out that way.

Well now that’s interesting… I never really considered how well point & click adventure games would work on mobile devices. That’s a good idea.

For example, there’s a book series called Liveship Traders which I guess has pirates and magical living ships but it’s all “high fantasy”. At least, that’s my understanding (I haven’t read them). I’m also not looking for steampunk/airship pirates, which you could consider fantasy.

I guess I’m broadly looking for more “horror themed” fantasy elements, if that makes sense. I agree that most pirate settings would lean more towards horror elements, but it isn’t a guarantee. I mean, there’s a Tinkerbell movie called The Pirate Fairy. Not interested.

I guess I really missed out on the Monkey Island games, they seem to be getting mentioned here a lot.

Is it OK to start with Return or do I need to play the older games first?

Awesome, thank you! You’re right, that description sounds perfect!

Perfect, thank you! You’re right, “undead pirate” or “ghost pirate” is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for.

I’ve been aware of the Monkey Island games for awhile but I guess I never knew there were supernatural elements to it. And I’ve never played any of the Total War games so I guess I need to look into those too!