Reclaim the Sea is a fantasy pirate game with some great potential. It is a single-player strategy roguelike, developed and published by 1 Last Game (published by indienova in China), that released in July of 2025. The gameplay can be entirely done with just your computer mouse and consists of managing your crew, weapons and ship as you make choices in text-based encounters and battle enemy ships in real time. The developers at 1 Last Game were inspired by the popular strategic roguelike game, FTL: Faster Than Light (developed and published by Subset Games in 2012). The developers also shared a post-release roadmap with bug fixes, balancing, quality of life changes and free content making the top of the list.
With procedurally generated maps and ships, each run in Reclaim the Sea offers a “new” experience. The graphics are a charming pixelated style. I find the sound effects of the ship taking damage, mixed with the pirate music, pleasant to my ears. The game includes 3 difficulty settings, 9 unlockable ships and 21 achievements to accomplish. There is a plethora of different builds and strategies for you to try. So, ready those combat birds, it’s time to discuss Reclaim the Sea!
The Story: A Shallow Tale
After selecting your ship, the game begins by giving you a very brief backstory and your main objective, “You must reach the capital city of Veritas.” Along the way, you encounter different ships, platforms, shops and text-based events as your travel throughout the map, ultimately searching for the exit to get to the next zone. Though there are different factions within the game, such as Civilians or the Scrapmetal Brigade, your main opposing faction are those in the Freedom Defenders. To bring about justice and freedom, you must defeat their battleships and free the oppressed people of the world!
Unfortunately, when it comes to the story, that’s pretty much all there is. There are a few tidbits of lore you can pick up, but nothing ever goes too deep. My best guess is that we, as pirates, are against oppressive social structures and the constraints of conventional society. The Freedom Defenders are trying to defend those ideals, and thus, are our enemy. It’s a pirate story for the ages, but is never fully explained in game and is only inferred. Despite that, I found myself being forgiving of the lack of lore due to the games charm and simplicity. I’d appreciate more, even something simple like a recovered diary page from a ship we plundered. However, that’s just my passion for stories and sometimes “it is what it is” as they say.
Another thing I appreciate is the sprinkling of fantasy elements that exist. Crew members are different races with different skill levels based on their race, such as the humans excelling in navigation and ship piloting, dwarves who are masters in repairs and handling machinery and elves who are formidable melee fighters. You can invest in automatons and have a ship full of robots. You can use lightning ammunition to destroy enemy rooms and magic shields to block projectiles. Reclaim the Sea still feels like a pirate ship sailing game at heart and the fantasy elements enhance the experience, rather than take over.
The Exploration: A Small World Full of Adventure
Reclaim the Sea has 4 resources that you will need to take into consideration as you explore. Food is consumed as you travel (depending on your crew). Gold is used for purchasing items at shops or for bribery. Wood is used to repair your ship and its barricade (if you have one). Ammo is used to fire the ship weapons. The 3 difficulties determine the amount of resources you start with and can gain as you explore. Your map, or zone, is scattered with various points of interest that will be revealed to you as you traverse. Your goal is to find the exit, which will then give you the option to either continue exploring or proceed to the next zone.
You will need to travel through 7 zones in total. Each zone has different levels of resources, weather hazards and hostility. You also get to choose the zone you will travel to, allowing for more opportunity to strategize. Though it may seem enticing to continue exploring after finding the exit, you will need to be mindful of your threat level. As you sail, your threat level continues to grow. This attracts bounty hunters and marauders to intercept your ship as it travels, leading to more battles and possibly to disaster. If you are feeling battle ready then by all means, explore to your hearts content with your cannons at the ready! Personally though, I would recommend taking the exit when your threat level gets to the red if not as soon as its discovered.
Each destination displays the current distance, the type, the faction it belongs to (when applicable) and the food cost to travel there. These points of interest you travel to can be ship battles, shops, or my personal favorite, text-based events. The text-based events will question morality, intuition and may even have long-lasting effects. It is a simple and straightforward system that I think most players will get the hang of easily.
Once you reach the final zone, a boss battle icon will appear on the map, allowing you to take on some of the heavy hitters in the game. After you achieve victory or suffer defeat, the game rewards you with your total stats, a final score and any achievements or ships you’ve unlocked. Then, it’s back to the home screen. Each run will most likely take 30 minutes to an hour to complete. Beyond the unlockable ships, it is a fresh start every time with nothing carrying over between runs. It is short, sweet and simple, but I will talk a little bit more on this later on in the review.
The Combat: Simple Controls and Strategic Planning
Combat in Reclaim the Sea is not the most demanding of the player. All combat, whether it’s cannons firing or people boarding, is done in real time with only a few clicks. You have the ability to freely pause whenever to input tactics and strategize. There are also some optional auto-pausing when a battle begins or a fire threatens to burn down the boat. At any point, you can input commands to your crew to either fire the weapons at a selected position or move them freely around the ship to the different rooms, such as the infirmary to heal up or the bridge to steer.
Personally, I do prefer my roguelikes to have a bit more action, games like Hades or Returnal to keep me on my toes. However, it was still nice to sit back with my cannons firing, my combat birds soaring, and watch the enemy ships sink into the murky depths. I should mention that there is an option to turn off auto-fire, though to be honest, I’m not entirely sure why you would.
You can also control your distance from the enemy ship with different distances having their advantages based on your strategy. Want to shoot from a safe distance with the opportunity to escape if disaster seems inevitable? Stay at a far distance with someone at the helm and fire those long range cannons. Want to board enemy ships and strike them down with swords? Get up close and use your grappling room to do so. However, setting a distance can be difficult as it depends on your ship’s speed in comparison to the enemy ship. I’ve found on a few occasions that no matter what I did, the enemy ship was always faster than mine, making them the decider of distance.
With different rooms, you can perform different actions. Every ship starts with a bridge and an engine, but some ships start with other rooms such as an infirmary to heal your crew or the perch to send out combat birds. You can purchase more rooms by buying them from shops up to certain amount depending on your ship.
Along with the rooms are the different weapons you can discover, from standard cannons to thunder mortars. It is important to have enough crew members or automatons to man the different rooms and weapons. The developers at 1 Last Game stated they wanted to allow for multiple different strategies and builds. Both the rooms and weapons are key in creating your ultimate strategy. With each new run, you can experiment and find new ones and I highly recommend doing so! In one run I stuck to firing cannons and playing defensively at a distance. In another I wanted to get up close and quickly gun or slice down the enemy crew. The game certainly appears to have that replayability factor that all roguelikes should have.
The Concerns: Too Much and also Not Enough?
At times, Reclaim the Sea can oddly feel both overwhelming and underwhelming on different aspects in the game. There is a lot you need to keep track. Because of this, the HUD feels cluttered and clunky with no options for customization. On top of the things to keep track of, you can upgrade almost everything at shops, up to level 4. The upgrades, however, have varying degrees of impact. The 10 extra points to my ship’s hull feels a lot more impactful in battle than upgrading my weapon room for 10 extra room HP and -10% reload time.
Different shops will offer different services, but this doesn’t feel varied enough. Along with upgrades and selling, you can also buy supplies, repairs, crew members, rooms, weapons, figureheads, augments and blueprints to add to your ship. Breaking down the shops point of interest could benefit strategy—for example, buying upgrades and repairs exclusively at a smithy, or recruiting more crew only by heading to a port. It could demand for better planning of travel. This also takes away the guarantee that you’ll find what you need at most shops.
The game might feel daunting to players who are unfamiliar with the genre. It demands a slight learning curve in order to fully grasp everything. There are no permanent resources that carry over between runs and requires the player to start fresh each time. There is no guarantee that you will do better in the next run. This alone is not necessarily that bad of a thing though! I enjoy a challenging game that I can sink hours into learning and researching the best strategies. New players might need to do multiple runs before they find a great strategy and can achieve their first victory.
Unfortunately, this brings me to my biggest concern for Reclaim the Sea. There is a sheer lack of content that exists in the text-based encounters. It is entirely possible to run into the same event multiple times in one playthrough. The outcomes also never seem to differ. Harvesting the whale meat caused my crew to fall ill, delayed my progress, leading to both food loss and a heightened threat level every time. The giant spiders never existed at the platform and I was instead greeted by a friendly shopkeeper.
The lack of variety in either events or their outcomes make the game feel stale, and dare I say, boring. This makes me worry about the longevity of the game in the eyes of the players. Once you find the right builds and are confident in your strategies, unlocked the ships and collected the achievements, aiming for a better final score does not feel all that compelling.
As mentioned, the game is inspired (and some some say copied from) FTL: Faster Than Light. In my research of Reclaim the Sea, I came across comments asking “why play this game instead of playing FTL“. Personally, I have not played FTL, but judging by the pictures and videos alone I can see the striking similarities. So why play Reclaim the Sea instead? FTL seems to be more polished, more expansive in content, slightly cheaper and more popular, with a modding community to add endless amounts of ingenuity and fun. Sadly, I can’t really answer that question yet, but I can see the potential in Reclaim the Sea.
The Conclusion: Avast Ye Maties, Reclaim the Sea could be a Treasure!
All hope is not lost for Reclaim the Sea! The developers have already shared a post-release roadmap with a treasure trove of updates. 1 Last Game’s Reclaim the Sea is still a charming and enjoyable—albeit brief—experience, blending pirates and strategy. There seems to be a promising future for the game and I hope the developers can deliver!
Thanks for reading and see you on the high seas!
