Curious Expedition 2 - Review

I stole a Llama statue; my donkey then fell in a hole and my teammate went so insane they cannibalised another. This has gone to hell, and I cannot stop.

Curious Expedition 2 is a turn-based narrative roguelike with heavy RNG elements. The world is set in 1889 Paris, explorers are many and there is a whole world to discover. You’re an explorer working for great Explorer Clubs, whilst also working for Victoria Malin who has made a crazy discovery and started a very dangerous chain of events.

Curious Expedition 2 offers three levels of difficulty, and from my experience these are less like ‘Easy, Normal and Hard’ and more like ‘Hard, Very Hard, and Insane’. If you’re a fan of games like Darkest Dungeon and Vambrace, you’ll have an absolute field day with Curious Expedition 2.

The game can be incredibly punishing as most roguelikes tend to be. However, Curious Expedition 2 does a really good job of letting you come very close to failure, survive and then recover. Your party members will becoming endearing, you’ll overlook their negatives, fall in love with their positives, and then they’ll fall into a chasm, be drowned or be impaled on a spike plant and you’ll never see them again. You’ll fall in love with your dogs and donkeys and have to throw away most of your treasure when they can murdered by a roaming monster.

Curious Expedition 2 is tough, and it keeps you wanting to press forward. The difficulty is punishing, but when you finally succeed the sense of relief is next level. You’ll return with a fully surviving team, a boatload of treasure and a sense of achievement. You’ll see your currency go flying up and you’ll feel unstoppable. Then you’ll get slammed back into the ground by a roaming Beast Shaman and you’ll be reminded that you’re just surviving.

There is a variety of interesting biomes in the game, and the worlds are procedurally generated. The game does a good job of making each time you play it a unique experience. The problem I encountered, is even though the islands were different and you had options of what to do, a lot of the time I just felt like I was rinse & repeating on a just slightly different island. There is a lot of repetition in the environment locations, and after a while they all sort of blend together. It’s not a major thing, but even though each time you play is meant to feel unique, the game quickly feels like it stays the same.

What sort of made this okay, was the different team members you can recruit. Most human characters will have a negative trait upon recruiting. They may be an alcoholic, be flippant in their loyalty, sexist or imperialist. In my circumstances I had a team-mate who went so insane as I was trying to get to the dig spot to end an expedition, they turned into a cannibal and ate one of my other team members. There is ways to purge these negative traits, but I didn’t find myself often doing so. I kind of liked the crazy randomness that these can cause. The interactions between your team-members during resting, that can result in love, loss or gain in loyalty, hatred or cannibalism.

They characters themselves make this game super enjoyable. The wildly different characters types you can get, how bizarrely compatible they can be, but also how wildly incompatible simultaneously really keeps you on your toes. The game quickly endears characters to you, only to throw a curve ball your way and have them eaten. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive that character for eating my favourite teammate.

The 2D aspect of the game is truly endearing. The artwork is fantastic, simple but beautiful. The characters look as whacky as they are, but it adds real charm to them. It’s incredibly easy on the eyes, and it made the overall game really enjoyable. You can randomise the appearance of your player character as many times as you like when starting a new campaign, and I don’t think I ever saw a character that looked the same as another. Sure, after a fair bit of time in game I’d see repeats, but in the 20-odd hours I put in, I didn’t see a single same appearance.

In the same vein, the sound design of the game is beautiful. It fits the time piece perfectly, and the serene peacefulness of it whilst my team is going insane and dying, is just the icing on the cake. It almost mocks your pain. Conversely, when you’re doing well the music feels rewarding. The sounds of the world feel like they’re praising your achievements. The sound of crowd cheers when you return successfully really fills you with a sense of pride and joy. The sound design complements the beautiful simple aesthetic of the game and amplifies the underlying feels you get whilst playing.

Combat is an interesting beast. The game uses an RNG dice system, of 3 colour types. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and get a bunch of attacks, and other times the game wants you to cry, and you can’t seem to get a single attack in. Of all roguelike games in this style, such as Darkest Dungeon, this game had the most punishing combat I’ve experienced. You can’t miss, but the super RNG heavy aspect of it can be really frustrating at times. A lot of times I’d fail an expedition because I would get surprise attacked, get slammed with bleeds and poisons, and then get only buffs and blank dice. You get chances to re-roll unused dice, and sometimes this works out well. There is a lot of nuance to the combat system, and it’s one that can be hard to delve into. It’s something that has to be experienced to fully comprehend, but be aware, the game doesn’t want it to be easy.

Interactions with native people in different biomes can widely affect how successful you can be. Characters that leave your party (usually because you have an alcoholic who hates you for not giving them whiskey), can turn whole islands against you. They’ll run your name through the mud, and you’ll have to give up so much of your treasure just to stop the natives of the islands from attacking you on sight. The fact that there is enough thought put in that disgruntled previous team members to have long-lasting repercussions is truly amazing.

In terms of story, the game is solid. It forces you to do the story, but the story is at least vaguely enjoyable. It’s interesting, if not a little tedious. Getting to key plot points can be frustrating, and progress can be infuriatingly slow. Thankfully, the actual gameplay elements of the unlocks that come with progressing the story, are enjoyable. Unlocking new biomes and characters to help improve aspects at a cost in Paris between expeditions feels rewarding. The game makes progress feel good, even if the story itself is a little lacklustre.

Curious Expedition 2 is a must-play for fans of narrative driven roguelike games. The characters, the world and the sheer absurdity of things that can occur is frustrating and incredibly fun at the same time. There is easily over a hundred hours’ worth of gameplay to be had and is very easily a game that I would go back to and play for extended periods. It is punishing, and sometimes the loss of progress can be very frustrating. Things can go incredibly badly really quickly and you sort of have no real control over it, but this adds an endearing quality to the game as well.

The Score

8.0

Review code provided by Thunderful

The Pros

+Charming Characters

+Beautiful world and sound design

+Rewarding Gameplay

The Cons

-Environments quickly feel repetitive

-Story is mediocre

-Relatively few expedition mission types