azorvani faegan information
Saurabh Cloudas
Curious Expedition is a roguelike expedition simulation set in the late 19th century. Take the role of famous historical personalities and venture forth on expeditions to unexplored regions on a quest for fame, science and, of course, fortune!
Don your pith helmet and khakis and make your way through a lush, procedurally generated world full of wonder and mystery.
Curious Expedition draws inspiration from the enthusiastic curiosity that for centuries have driven the human species to the far corners of the earth. Take part in the glory and wonder, but also the horror and peril that is the constant companion of the explorer.
Race to the halfway around the world and beyond in an often cut-throat competition for fame or infamy with your colleagues and rivals at the Explorers Club. Raise your reputation and win the ultimate recognition through donations to the museum, or line your pockets with your looted riches.
Now go explore, adventure awaits!
Set in a reimagined version of the late 19th Century, Curious Expedition 2 takes turn-based rogue-like gameplay and combines it with an exciting story. You explore procedurally generated maps to complete objectives and search for treasure, weighing up risk and reward as you go. A sanity system acts as a constant foil, alongside a myriad of random features and events that make each expedition a measure of tactics and greed as you consider what is worth the risk.
Curious Expedition 2 is a fun adventure that will have you eager to see its campaign through to conclusion. That being said, it leaves little reason to return afterward. The gameplay loop soon becomes tiresome as you encounter the same situations over again, with the lack of any real variation making everything feel stale. Fans of challenge may find reward in further runs of the game but for anyone else, this expedition is one best left in the past.
Curious Expedition 2 tells a story full of adventure and intrigue that sustains the game through its short campaign. The repetitive nature of the gameplay soon becomes stale however, offering little reason to extend your expedition beyond the main story.
The Curious Expedition [official site] is a turn-based game of exploration and exploitation in which you control one of several historical characters, wandering the world in search of fame and fortune. After a long trek through the wildlands of Early Access, it has emerged as a complete game today. But does it belong in a museum or should it have been left to rot in the ground? Here's wot I think.
A hundred days into what was to be our last journey together, everything went horribly wrong. We'd lost companions before - to fever, to hunger, to aggressive wildlife - but this was different. Seizing some sacred treasure from a shrine we unleashed what can best be described as The End Times. We'd triggered localised unpleasantries before, including firestorms, floods and the replacement of entire vibrant ecoystems with life-sapping desert, but never anything like this. It was a void, consuming the world itself and leaving nothing in its wake.
We hopped into our hot air balloon, headed back to London and didn't mention the incident to anyone at the explorer's club. Let us pray that the awful nothingness that spilled out of that shrine is not growing still and that it will never reach these shores.
The Curious Expedition is a game about trekking across procedurally generated maps, searching for treasure and leaving a trail of destruction wherever you go. Sure, it's possible to tread softly and treat those you meet with respect, but the game really shines when you're skipping from one catastrophe to the next with a mule-load of treasure in tow.
I love it. If you remember Strange Adventures in Infinite Space fondly, it scratches a similar urge. It's a coffeebreak game, and I mean that as a very strong compliment. You can play through an expedition in a few minutes, though you could also spend much longer agonising over decisions and trying to make the best of every bad situation. With its emergent narratives and threats, it has something in common with Spelunky and the old Escape From Atlantis boardgame as well as some recent roguelites. I'm not going to tell you about everything that there is to find because expeditions are all about discovery after all, so keep that in mind as you read. There is more to the game than jungles and shrines.
A full playthrough comprises six expeditions, usually increasing in difficulty from one to the next though you do have a choice of locations (randomly selected) and can attempt to stick to better-trodden paths. Once you've arrived at your destination, you uncover the map by exploring. Time waits for you as you plan your next move, and you can always see exactly how much Sanity a particular journey will cost.
Sanity is your main resource, which is a little odd, almost seeming like a leftover touch of thematic flavour from a time when the game focused more on the horror of the unknown. There are still dark corners of the Earth (and possibly beyond) to risk your life and emotional wellbeing in, but The Curious Expedition is more King Solomon's Mines than Mountains of Madness. At least for the most part. Lovecraft is a featured character after all.
And so you wander, fairly directionless at first, perhaps sticking to easy terrain, or maybe trying to reach the question marks that appear on the fringes of the areas you're covering. These could be anything from abandoned camps to native villages, all of which lead to short text-based encounters. Villages are among the most interesting places because the reception your party meets depends on their reputation in the area, which can rise or fall depending on your actions across the entire map. Plunder shrines and other sacred places, and you might find yourself in hot water.
As you explore, the compass at the top-left of the screen zeroes in on the location of the Golden Pyramid, which is the end-goal in each location. Find that and you can scarper home with all of your treasures in tow. Fail to find it before sanity and restoratives runs thin and you can escape by balloon, but you'll have to leave most of your treasure behind. And that's important because expeditions are competitions.
While you'll never encounter them out in the field, there are computer-controlled adventurers seeking treasure of their own. Essentially, they're scores to compete against, their total fame ranked against yours at the close of each expedition. There's a neat choice whereby the pelts and treasures you bring home can be traded for either cash or fame when you return to London. Should you rush ahead on the fame leaderboard by donating an idol to the museum, or would it be more sensible to flog the blasted thing so that you can buy guns and whiskey for the next trip?
Risk and reward. That's the heart of so many games and it's front and centre in The Curious Expedition, and nowhere is it more obvious than in those shrines. The ones I mentioned at the beginning of this review, that can lead to a yawning void swallowing the world. They're the most dramatic way in which the emergent qualities of the environment are exposed, with fires that spread based on terrain type, floods that create inland lakes or connect back to the sea, and a few other tricks and traps besides.
This is a fantastic game for generating anecdotes, as I found when I first played it way back when, but it's also an enjoyable challenge. I already want expansions because discovering something new on an expedition is exciting and that doesn't happen enough after a few playthroughs (on the subject of possible expansions, I'm glad that there are already fantastical elements in play because it makes anything seem possible).
Thankfully, I find the core loop attractive enough that I'm not playing just for the novelty of new encounters. The dynamic changes to terrain are impressive and highlight how exquisitely detailed the world is, and even when I reach the sixth expedition and end up cursing the impossible list of tasks I need to complete in order to unlock the pyramid, I find it hard not to start all over again as soon as I'm done.
When Graham told me that Curious Expedition 2 was a lot like Curious Expedition 1, I immediately told him that was fine. Curious Expedition 1 was great! It's a roguelike about managing parties of adventurers as they explore mysterious islands, making friends with the natives while desecrating their shrines and spreading calamity throughout their lands. (I think it was self-aware enough to get away with this, for the most part.) You wind up with stories about how your party nearly starved to death, but just about managed to tide themselves over by feasting on their donkey. I was psyched to see my people starve once more.
Each game is still structured around three expeditions, though this time those are tied into a plot thread that persists between runs. I found myself competing against a rival explorer, with the both of us racing to discover an Ancient Stone Slab. I did this by picking my way across several islands (smaller, this time round), taking care to select routes that didn't over exert my party. Every tile you travel drains your sanity meter (which, as in the first game, could easily have been labelled "morale" instead), so you need to ration out momentum-preserving items like chocolate and whisky. There are items that let you navigate different terrain more easily, and events where you hunt wild animals, chat to natives, rest up at waterfalls, and poke around mysterious inland shipwrecks.
Problem is, those shipwrecks stop being mysterious the moment you find your third one. For this to work, you need to see these events as events, not just mechanical opportunities to gain loot. That's supposed to be a major selling point, but this time round I'm not buying. Not only did the the same events pop up again and again, my central objectives repeated, too. I went after the same Slab twice, and to do that I twice had to prove my worth to the locals. It's hard to suspend your disbelief when you're asked to kill two identical hyenas for two identical tribesmen.
c01484d022