Becalmed at sea for over a decade, this piratical hack-and-slash game is releasing later this year

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 influence. One of Captain Blood's swords has no fewer than six skulls on it. That's pure 2010, to me.

In terms of story, it looks like Captain Blood's been hired to rescue «the local magistrate’s beautiful buxom daughter,» which judging from the trailer is perhaps putting it mildly. That, too, is 2010 to me. More character designers have learned a healthy sense of shame since then. But with a name like «Captain Blood,» I'm sure our hero has only the noblest of intentions.

Captain Blood gets its second shot at