Curious Expedition 2

Review

Victoria Malin is considered one of the greatest explorers in 1880. Her latest expedition saw her discovering the fascinating South American country of Peru. The expedition itself was a total success. However, on the way back to her headquarters in Paris, she came across a storm of such ferocity that many of her crew were thrown overboard into the extremely agitated ocean. Her vessel miraculously seemed to cope with wave after gigantic wave crashing into it. Despite being thrown around like being inside a washing machine, Victoria managed to see land and decided to head towards it. As her ship approached the Island, the sea became calmer, and she safely reached shore. Interestingly, this particular island isn't mentioned in any available maps. After exploring the island and talking to the natives, Victoria sees a strange, possibly ancient structure, and after studying it for a while, she decides to touch it. Instantly, a purple storm erupts from it, and the only way to escape is to go back to her ship and hope for the best!  Thankfully, she makes it back to Paris, but her new role of Director of the Expedition Universelle restricts participation in any new expeditions. So, you are the next biggest explorers in line. Are you ready for the next extraordinary adventures, helping Victoria to find this invisible Island?

Curious Expedition 2 is a rogue-like turn-based combat strategy game developed by Maschinen-Mensch and published by Thunderful Publishing on 28^th January 2021 on the Steam platform. The game will become available for Nintendo Switch, Playstation and Xbox platforms later on in 2021.

As you start your first playthrough, you'll be playing Victoria Malin when she lands on the mysterious Island after the massive storm. This first Island is basically a very good tutorial. Then, when you are back in Paris, you'll have to choose who will become the leader of your next expedition and in which level of difficulty you'll be playing it: Traveller, Adventurer or Lunatic. After all that, your adventures will start in beautiful downtown Paris in 1886, where you'll plan your first and all subsequent expeditions.

Each year, you'll be able to go on three expeditions. The first two will be to earn fame and experience, and the third one will be a part of the overall story. One thing you'll have to do before going on your next expedition is to go to the famous Boussole Cassee Pub, where you can recruit new crew members and ask for financial help if you have enough expo tickets. You'll receive expo tickets when you successfully complete an expedition and return with most of your goods and treasures. The maximum number crew members who can accompany you in your travels is four; five including you. You'll also be able to visit three houses/sponsors in Paris. At the start of the game, you won’t be able to do much when you visit them, but as your playthrough progresses, you'll unlock items, characters and use specific abilities to upgrade items, train or heal your characters. Of course, if you have enough expo tickets.

When you are ready to leave Paris, you'll need to choose your next expedition and sponsor, buy items that you might need, and start your new adventure.

Each Island you visit will be procedurally-generated, and each of them will have different dangers and places to visits. As you land, you'll see a little bit of the top-down relief map; the rest of it will be in a fog. You'll be allocated a certain number of sanity or movement points which you'll use to move your party around the Island. As the environment of each island varies, the cost of movements might differ as well. For example, it will cost you more points to travel through dense forests or swamps than on a flat surface. You'll come across areas with mosquitos and dangerous plants, which can give give one or more of your characters a serious illness.  You can also come across areas full of tar which will penalise your movement too. So, you need to make sure you have enough Sanity points at any given time. If you were wise enough to buy plenty of whiskey, chocolate and tins of tuna, for example, you could use them to revitalise your sanity points in the map view. You’ll also want to find a place to rest. Places like missionary churches or local tribe villages can offer you a resting place overnight and revitalise your sanity points, but you mostly need to trade to be able to rest. However, if you find an Oasis, waterfalls or spring water sites, you can rest for free.

As you move around each island, you'll find sites to visit, such as shrines, shipwrecks, caves and deserted camps.  When you find one of these sites, you'll have to choose what to do, and the dice mechanism will be implemented. As you know, a conventional dice has 6 faces. When you start the game, all the characters in your group will have four faces of the dice covered with actions and colours. The action will be available during a fight, but the colour will determine a specific action's outcome.  For instance, when you want to search the deserted camp you might need to have a minimum of two green faces to be successful. If you have a total of 3 characters with each, you will have 3 green dice faces. Well, you might think that you have a great chance to roll at least three green faces. But it might be totally the opposite, and you might use a cunning tonic which is green and will add another dice before the roll, which can improve your chances of success. But bear in mind that most of these items can also be use in turn-based combat, so be wise about when to use them.

You'll also come across traders, villagers and dangerous animals. Dangerous animals will trigger the combat phase, but you can also have the native tribes after you if they disapprove of your actions on their Island. The combat phase also uses the dice mechanism, but you can re-roll any dice (actions) once before starting the fight in this instance. Remember that most of your characters will start with four actions/colours per dice, so each dice will have two blank faces. You might be very unlucky and get only blank faces. So the re-roll is always good to have.  From then on, it is conventional turn-based combat using the action from the dice.

You can upgrade your characters during an expedition as you earn experience points that can be used every time you discover a location. You'll need 10 XP to upgrade a character to level 2 and 20 XP to level 3 etc.

At the end of your successful expedition, you'll receive fame points and expo tickets, but that will depend on returning home with treasures. You'll also receive experience points from your sponsor and unlock items and other goodies.

As many might know, I was born in Europe and lived there until my late teens, and I am extremely familiar with the French-Belgian comic books such as Sammy, Les Tuniques Bleues, Asterix and Tintin! I love the graphics style as they managed to replicate this genre fabulously. I also like the fact that the game has procedurally-generated levels and storytelling (events that occur between characters and when you run out of sanity points), giving the game plenty of replayability. A fun little story, and after playing for nearly 12 hours, I only unlocked a few things while playing in the adventurer difficulty.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com