Didn't originally write a review for this because I didn't finish it, but I feel like I need to get some closure here. Sagres was one of my biggest disappointments this year. This might be an odd thing to say of a game who's existence I learned of the very same day it released but the demo I played of it had so much promise and charm I can't believe they fucked it up.

Sagres is an exploration themed RPG set in the age of sail. Under the auspices of Prince Henry the navigator of Portugal, you play as an aspiring sailor who joins the navy in part to help a friend get to the bottom of the intrigue of her missing Father. The game's name derives from the popular (if wrong) idea of Prince Henry setting up a sort of center of learning at the town of Sagres to train cartographers and navigators of all sorts. But don't worry, thats like the least of Sagres' liberties when it comes to historical accuracy.

The core of Sagres is simple, you obtain information and quests from guilds to "discover" landmarks around the world, ranging from "check out this church in Spain, we've heard it looks cool" to "Figure out if we can reach India via Africa because the land route is not really feasible right now". You have to manage your ship's durability and resources, though its not super in depth and you can do the usual thing of trading resources by buying goods from one port and selling it at another where its a higher price. This is the good bit of this game.

There's also turnbased, literal rocks, paper, scissors combat with pirates and other enemy sailors. You line up 3 cards to play against the opponents 3 cards and the level of "insight" your character has determines how many cards you can see face up from either the 3 cards on the table or the cards the AI isnt playing this round. Its fine, mostly RNG fest, I lost like twice during the whole game even though I was "underleveled". Also, this game doesn't understand what a privateer is? A privateer isnt just the name for a european pirate, its a pirate in service to a country.

I think I was sold on the demo and the game when I reached Copenhaguen and none of my party members spoke the local language very profficiently so the dialogue with the local pub owner who would give me information on where to see the northern lights for the quest I was in went some thing like "H`, yo/)ll ne^+ to hçad <p t@ t`ç 66&X 20*>". I could either guess what he was trying to say or search around for a Translator in a nearby port. This would cost money and time, importantly, which I might not have. Its moments like these or even when I was going around africa blindly not knowing where the next port was with dwindling supplies, a damaged ship and low crew morale and I managed to just about reach the safety of port, Sagres excels.

And man, we do not have enough historical themed non action RPGs that don't suck. There's like, Pentiment, Darklands(though I havent played it yet) and what? Maybe there's some Japanese one's I dont know about.

So, given all this goodwill, how does Sagres fuck it all up? Well, for one thing, that language system I mentioned is kinda rough. Now, I get that in a game such as this there are going to have to be compromises and simplifications and I'll even grant that it makes sense to treat certain languages more as language families or perhaps take the view of the portuguese navigators rather than a more objective modern view. But at some point it just doesn't make sense that Spanish and Portuguese get their own languages but "Romance", "Germanic" and most egregious of all "African" get lumped in as if they were monolithic.

Similarly, whilst the game at least has the good sense to condemn imperialism of the Americas, its hard not to see the entire game as a romanticisation of european colonialism through the lens of "exploration". Although unintentionally it does kinda subvert it by having 90% of these "discoveries" be places that were well known beforehand like the cathedral at Santiago etc. There is also the whole chapter of the game taking place in the americas which, idk man I'm not the most qualified to talk about and it has been a week or two since I played it but its about what you would expect in terms of pretty milquetoast commentary on colonialism and the like (though there's one point at which the indigenous leader talks about how much he likes this new rum that the europeans have been making which uhh)

There is also a chapter in which you go to Egypt and in order to enter Alexandria (which is closed off to europeans apparently) you have to... wear a turban. Thats seemingly all it takes for europeans to blend in with Egyptians. I think this is where the first red flag appeared to me.

There's also a semi fantastical element, which I'm fine with because its kind of hidden, its like they took all the stories of sailors encountering fantastical creatures and just made it real.

Anyways, at the end of my playthrough I got to the point in which you reach the Americas and it becomes extremely tedious. Beyond the aforementioned stuff with the depiction of the preHispanic central America, the game takes away all your ship parts and makes you go around for way, way too long to obtain them all, grinding as you are essentially in a sort of slave/serf relationship to an indigenous chief. After all that and grinding trade between havana and some town on the yucatan I had all my ship parts paid off and returned, whereupon I was informed I needed to grind 200,000 of the local currency in order to proceed. I had 3500. So I abandoned the game, it wasn't hard to make money admittedly, just slow and tedious, but the game had already lost me and frankly I have better things to do.

I give this game an extra half a star for including Las Palmas as a port and ignoring Tenerife completely. I audibly cheered when I saw this. That being said, the inhabitants shared the default sprite for "Africa" which, I guess given the previous simplifications in language and culture isnt super egregious but it just underscores the lack of understanding or care.