The whole thing feels like someone left their rough sketch layer visible and called it a style. Not in a bad way necessarily, just... deliberate. Queens Of The Sea has this unpolished line art quality that makes every scene feel like a private doodle you found in a notebook, which fits when you're jumping between a captured navy lieutenant and a noblewoman both trying to figure out which of these pirate women they can actually trust. Or fuck. Usually both.
The dual protagonist thing is where my brain started doing philosophy major backflips. You get John Silver's perspective, all military discipline crumbling under the weight of Anne Bonny's thighs, and then suddenly you're Sarah Bonnet having a completely different crisis about power dynamics while Mary Read's hand is somewhere it shouldn't be. The game doesn't really resolve the tension between these two viewpoints, it just lets them sit there like an uncomfortable question. What does consent even mean when everyone's technically a prisoner? The pirates hold the swords but also they're the ones offering genuine connection. I kept thinking about Hegel's master-slave dialectic during a surprisingly tender lesbian scene and that's probably not normal but here we are.
The historical mashup is completely unhinged in the best way. Real pirate names, real locations, then suddenly there's a blowjob happening on a ship that definitely never existed. The writing swings wildly between actual naval terminology and dialogue that sounds like it escaped from a Tumblr roleplay thread circa 2014. I wish the handjob scenes had more mechanical variety but they won't change that now. There's this one moment where you're making choices for Sarah while she's watching something she shouldn't be watching, and the voyeurism tag suddenly makes sense in a way that felt more interesting than most games that just slap that label on. The alternate history stuff is barely alternate, mostly just "what if pirates were hot women and also everyone was bisexual." Which, fair enough honestly.
The big ass tag is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Like, a concerning amount. Someone on the dev team had a specific vision and they committed to it completely.