Curious Expedition is a bizarro-ass 3/5 On my scale, a 3/5 game is good. It is satisfying, fun, and otherwise worth the purchase price, with some caveats. Iām going to start with the obvious: this game is B I Z A R R E . The entire premise of the game is completely cooked: roleplay a colonial explorer as they systematically plunder the artifacts of native peoples, entice disaster of cataclysmic proportions into said native populations because āhehe xd,ā and get mauled by all manner of natural and unnatural enemies. When I first played through this game, I was somewhat mortified, especially as someone of Latin American heritage who was raised by an archeologist of Mexican history. I did not appreciate the implication that the game was making these explorers out to be heroes, and so I left it. About a year later, Iām traveling for a month without access to my PC. Bored of everything else I could play on my Mac, I booted this up to kill time. This second time, I still didnāt like that aforementioned implication, but I slowly started to appreciate that, perhaps, the game was doing something a little more complex. Perhaps the game serves as a meta-critique of the colonial explorer experience, and it demonstrates how the lines between reality and fantasy are often entirely blurred in the written accounts explorers would publish after their āadventures.ā You begin your expeditions going to continents that seem ānormal.ā The disasters that arise from stealing the artifacts align with the perceived experiences these explorers often had about the presence of native deities (although they were obviously committed to believing these were heretical). As you progress and your fame grows, you head off into ever more fantastical realms inhabited by dinosaurs, giant mushrooms, giant crabs, giant chickens, and āzombie pygmies,ā among other things. So as your fame, and presumably your ego, grows, your tales become inherently more fantastical, more outlandish, more prone to exaggerations. You realize that perhaps there is a reason sanity is the foundational resource in this game and that maybe the mere act of exploring these outlandish places facing terrifying and terrible odds of survival is maddening. Certainly, historical accounts demonstrate that for all the destruction they wrought on native peoples, the actual individual explorers who survived (because many didnāt) tended to return ānot quite right in the head.ā So I believe that Curious Expedition serves as a commentary and critique in this angle of the story because thatās more interesting than whatās on the surface. Phew, now that I got that out of the way, what is the game like? Well, completely fucked. This is a brutal roguelike. There is no rogue āliteā in this game; if you die, thatās it. The game pulls no punches on its difficulty and is quite unabashed about beating you down alongside your characters. If you are here for a more relaxed experience, donāt be fooled: this shit is not relaxing. Or at least, it requires you to think and plan because otherwise youāre going to have a bad time. The core gameplay is quite simple. You are the leader of an adventuring group seeking out fame by exploring the wilderness of the ānon-civilizedā (i.e. non-European) parts of the world. You have a hexagonal map, and you click to walk. Thatās it. This game lets you roleplay that Civ scout you send off to uncover the world, except that said scout is always on the edge of insanity and is also bipolar and is also responsible for the blackhole currently consuming the forest. The core foundational mechanic is walking and exploring. But you canāt just walk in the wilderness, as being removed from the comforts of civilization and trudging through unfamiliar territory constantly fearing death drains your sanity. So each step costs a different amount of sanity to make, depending on the terrain. If the terrain sucks to traverse in real life, expect a high cost of sanity (e.g. plans are nice to walk through, forests can take longer and be more spooky, deserts will kill you if you donāt have water, marshes suck, and climbing verticle cliffs with no gear is quite hard). If you hit 0 sanity, you will experience pretty terrible outcomes including, but not limited to: your party characters putting a gun to their mouth, preferring death to this hell; a character developing schizophrenia, or perhaps borderline personality disorder (or on a slightly less somber note a fear of butterflies ); a character hallucinating that the pack donkey just spoke to them; one party member discovering another party member eating their dog in a fit of madness-induced hunger; and many more pleasant experiences. So, to put it bluntly, being an adventurer is a high-risk profession, and the greatest risk you will ever face is the ever-present fragility of your own mental health. But thatās to be expected when youāre out in the wilderness with no food or water for 100 days straight. The point of each map is to be the first to discover a giant golden pyramid and bring back as many artifacts as you can along the way. Generally, you can only do this by finding native shrines and upsetting local deities by stealing their offerings. Generally, this causes calamities which are much more fun to discover by experience. Doing so can net you money or fame (but not both!) for each item you bring back. The game's ultimate goal is to be the most famous explorer at the end of 6 progressively dangerous expeditions. It is pretty cool that the game endeavored to make all of its playable characters very distinctively unique. Unfortunately, this makes some characters brutally hard to play. Iāve had the most fun with militaristic teams, which one-shot all enemies they encountered, and all of my experiences playing pacifist characters have ended in one-way tickets to Valhalla (or, rather, Val-hell-a). This encourages replayability and can make the game feel less formulaic. But it doesnāt save the game from being formulaic or repetitive. The greatest downfall of Curious Expedition is that you start to understand how the game generates its maps after youāve succeeded in two or three games. This is important because not understanding the spawn patterns or geographic indications of the later-game golden seals is a death sentence, so learning these patterns makes the game more playable. However, this generally means that the game becomes āgo to this corner, then this corner, then that corner,ā and can make exploring feel formulaic. At that point, everything in your way just becomes kind of annoying rather than interesting or engaging. This is especially brutal because the game expects you to complete six back-to-back expeditions, all of which are just more of the same things, just slightly harder, for each of the 18 explorers. So at a minimum, the game expects you to complete 108 expeditions. Not to mention that one of the achievements is for completing 500 expeditions. After 20 hours of playing the game, I have completed 71 expeditions. By this point, I know how everything will play out, Iāve found most of the secrets I can reasonably find without a guide, and the rest of the achievements are ādo X very annoying/hard things 10-15 times.ā A completionist run of this game probably would make your IRL sanity decrease to the point youāre experiencing comparable psychotic breaks. So, this game does some very interesting things. Iād say 20 hours of gameplay is probably more than the average person will handle this game. I only did because I literally had nothing better to do. So it is a good game, and I do recommend it, since I think there is enough here for a general audience to give it a shot. Just beware the difficulty, prepare to be pissed, and expect replayability to reel repetitive. Buy on sale.
Read more