Download Pirate Twist Demo

About This Game

Build your ship. Brave the seas.

Come home richer, or don't come home at all.

Pirate Twist is a top-down naval roguelite. You get one ship, one captain, and a chart full of bad options. Everything else you have to take off somebody.

She starts as a sloop with a single gun on each side. By the third sea she can be a floating battery, a hull too thick to crack, or a ram that opens a brigantine like a crate. That depends on what you find, what you can afford, and what you are willing to sail into.

A Ship You Fit Out Yourself

Fourteen berths: three gunports a side, two at the bow, three amidships, three at the stern. Eighteen modules competing for them.

Light cannons fire fast and cheap. Heavy cannons punch holes. The mortar keeps up a slow, relentless rain. Hull plating trades weight for survival. A repair station patches you mid-fight. A crow's nest hardens the whole ship the moment it is rigged. Iron-shod beakheads and knighthead bracing, taken from sieges and dead boss captains, turn your bow into a weapon and your waist into a wall.

Lose a fight and the campaign survives. You rebuild at Port for a bill scaled to how far you had upgraded, then sail that sea again from the start.

What the Captain Keeps

Gold does not survive a run. Captains do. XP earned in combat buys nine skills across three branches, and those stay bought whether you win or sink. Five captains, two open from the start and the rest earned by finishing campaigns, each with a signature crew and a buff that bends the whole run around it.

Win a campaign and that captain sails again at a harder Ascension tier. The threat climbs as you do, on purpose.

Every Chart Branches

Seven to ten columns of choices stand between you and the captain waiting at the end of each sea.

• Pirate fleets, thick with elites once the water turns dangerous

• Uncharted waters that only show their hand as you arrive: flat calm, a storm, a lucky wreck, or the Scourge

• A port under siege whose walls you hold through five waves

• The Chandler's Trading Post, where you can barter, buy off his black market, gamble any resource you carry, or pay for a sealed crate and find out

• The Sea Cave, which keeps no charts: a torch that burns out in under a minute, walls that bite, and rockfall that changes sides halfway through

Each sea ends in a duel with a named captain drawn from a pool of six, and you do not know which one you drew until the chart shows you.

Broadsides, Not Crosshairs

No cursor. No twitch aim. You choose your live side, port or starboard, and swing it onto the target. The guns roar the moment she is in the arc.

Where a shot goes in matters as much as whether it lands. Chain shot tears sails and takes their speed with it. Grape shot cuts down crew, and a short-handed ship reloads slowly. Fire shot sets a deck burning and the fire keeps working long after you have sailed on. Put a shot in through an enemy's stern, straight down the length of her, and it deals more than double the damage.

The pirates know all of this. They will do every bit of it to you.

The Wind Has Opinions

You do not hold a thrust key. You set a gear and she takes the sea as she finds it: reverse, a third, two thirds, full sail. The wind veers while you fight. Chain shot in your sails costs you speed you cannot buy back until Port.

Some fights open dead calm, and a dead calm always breaks. Distant thunder, the ship's bell, then lightning picking its targets over open water.

What Is in the Hold

• Three seas per campaign, roughly a single sitting. Save and quit anywhere, including mid-broadside

• 18 modules across 14 berths, in six module types

• 5 captains, 9 skills, 6 crew roles, 6 named boss captains

• 4 ammo types, with damage that lands on hull, sails or crew depending on what you loaded

• A guided first voyage if you want one, and a skip if you do not

• 35 achievements, a global leaderboard, lifetime stats, Steam Cloud saves

• Windows and macOS, Universal on Mac (Intel and Apple Silicon)

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Pirate Twist is made by a solo developer, and generative AI tools were used across production. Specifically:

Art — some in-game visual art and the store capsule art were generated with Higgsfield image models against a fixed art-direction style, then hand-edited by the developer's wife: cut out, composited, colour-matched and retouched before going into the build.

Audio — the seven music tracks were generated with Suno (Premier). Sound effects were generated with the ElevenLabs Sound Effects API (Creator). All were then edited, pitch-shifted and mastered by the developer's wife.

Code — written with AI coding assistance.

No AI runs at runtime. Nothing is generated on your machine while you play, and the game makes no AI service calls during play.

Full commissioned art and audio is one of the items on the Roadmap for final release.