Made and Published by Maschinen-Mensch
Played on: Microsoft Windows
Also Available on: MAC OS and Linux
We all know the many famous explorers that have graced our history textbooks. Greats such as Charles Darwin, Amelia Earhart, H.P. Lovecraft, Marcus Garvey..? Okay, some of these great people may not be explorers, but they are famous, and have had an impact on the world in one way or another. The Curious Expedition is a rogue-like, turn based strategy game with procedurally generated maps. The goal is to compete against four other explorers and have your explorer, whom you pick, become the most famous of them all. You will have to travel to Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, Antarctica and many other places in your search for treasure.
When playing the game, you will have six expeditions. Each one will become progressively harder. The final goal of each expedition is to find the golden pyramid, located somewhere on the map. The maps slowly get larger, and many obstacles will stand in your way. The first three expeditions simply require you to find the golden pyramid. The final three expeditions will have you wander the map looking for moonstones. You will need one or two of these stones to be able to gain entry into the golden pyramid.
With the map changing every time due to you being able to pick the area you explore in addition to the procedural generation, the game never feels old. Every expedition will feel new and exciting. You will encounter villages with indigenous peoples, sacred temples, abandoned campsites and shipwrecks, mysterious caves, and an assortment of other locations to explore and loot. Exploration in the game is done in a turn-based manner. You will click the place you want your exploration party to go to on the grid based map and they will move to that location. They can go as far as you want them to in one turn, as long as the place they are going was revealed to you on the map before you sent them and they are not interrupted along the way. Moving consumes sanity, which is important. Sanity is what keeps your party together. Moving through rough environments such as thick jungles and deep rivers will drain your party of sanity. If you run out of sanity, increasing bad things will happen to your band of explorers, and they will eventually perish from the game’s pixelated Earth. In addition to exploring the map, you will have to face it’s many dangers. Ravenous wildlife roam the land, and are alerted to your presence whenever you stop to rest or loot an important location. If you desecrate too many sacred sites, the native people will send out armed search parties to hunt you down and sacrifice you to their gods.
Combat in the game is straightforward. You and your party members will face the enemy in turn-based combat, similar to many JRPG games. The difference here is that each character in your party will have a different set of die that can be rolled any number of times depending on how many people are in your expedition (i.e. if you have five people, the maximum, you can roll your die five times before your turn ends.) Some characters only have support die while others only have attack die. You mix and match these different skills to make powerful and/or helpful attacks and defensive abilities in battle. But be careful, like in many turn-based games, if the main character dies in battle, (your explorer), then the game ends.
If you make it to the golden pyramid, you will return to London. There, you will first get to pick an upgrade. You are presented with three random upgrades after each expedition. Some of these increase the amount of sanity you have. Others will make you lose less sanity when crossing certain terrain, or allow you to carry more items among others. Afterwards, you will sell off the treasure you have found. You can either sell your treasure to the museum, and get fame, which if you have the most fame you win, or, you could sell your treasure on the open market to get cash for your next expedition. Finally before you depart, you will get a chance to buy new equipment, upgrade some of your party members, and get a quest opportunity which you can or cannot accept. These quests tend to repeat each playthrough and consist of finding a person or delivering a letter to someone. If you complete the quests while on your next expedition, then you will receive a cash benefit or a small amount of fame. If you fail, then you will have fame deducted from your total score and not get any money.
While I really like the game for it’s variety and personal charm, I have issues with it. My first is the game’s performance issues. On my computer (which can run the game perfectly fine according to the system specs on the steam page) I have encountered many glitches that really ruin the experience. The first one I noticed is the sound. The soundtrack to the game is very fitting for exploration in the game’s engrossing world and I really enjoy listening to it while playing the game. However, it sounds like a small mammal being run through the garbage disposal at times. I would be investigating a tomb in sub-saharan Africa, and then all of the sudden hear the slow, distorted lurching of the rhyme to the main theme. It really does sound awful and I turn the volume off every time it happens, which is pretty frequent. Other performance issues include the frame-rate dropping and the combat screen taking a while to appear. These didn’t happen to me often but they are still a persistent problem.
Another issue I have with the game is the autosave feature. Every few minutes the game will auto-save due to the lack of a manual save function during expeditions. While this did help a few times after I died and wanted one last shot at completing the expedition, this feature is mostly there to taunt you. Most of the time the game saves right before you are ambushed by an enraged group of natives or before you party suffers from a third night without any remaining sanity. I’m not even sure why the game has an autosave feature. From my experience it really only seems to give you the ability to see the moment of your demise over and over again. Frankly I think sticking with the permadeath one-and-done gameplay would have been a better option.
Overall, The Curious Expedition is a pleasant experience. It has hours of the reliably fun permadeath, roguelike gameplay that we see in other great indie games like The Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. The maps are full of entertaining stops and objectives that tie into the overall goal of the game. The combat takes a different approach from other games, which is a good thing as this keeps the game feeling new in a crowded genre. I think that the game is worth 15 dollars despite the performance issues. They may make the game less satisfying to play, but really don’t get in the way of the enjoyment. Just don’t wear headphones. As always, a VITA version of this game would be epic, and would help eliminate performance issues, but I know that we won’t be seeing any of that, at least not soon.
I am giving The Curious Expedition an 8 out of 10
Did Lazarus Die
Pros:
Fun concept and execution
Die Lazarus Expedition Mac Os 11
Great turn-based combat
Procedural generation mixed with turn-based movement done well
Die Lazarus Expedition Mac Os Catalina
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THE BALMIS MISSION: AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPEDITION by Ma. Reyno On April 15, 1805 the vaccine against smallpox, one of the deadliest and most physically disfiguring diseases ever known to man, arrived in the Philippines. Francisco Xavier de Balmis, court physician of the Spanish crown, the medical life-saving continue reading: The Balmis Mission: An Extraordinary Expedition.
Cons:
Minor performance issues
Annoying auto save system
Die Lazarus Expedition Mac Os X
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