Curious Expedition - Review
Pip pip old chap and all that toffery, it’s time to put on the monocle and roll out a map of the uncharted territories. Curious Expedition is here and in search of explorers ready to scour the world for treasure. Fortunately you’re up to the task because these temples aren’t going to raid themselves. Grab your safari hat and delve into the deepest jungles for the most Curious Expedition.
Curious Expedition is all about being the best explorer, racing against other historical explorers to gain fame and fortune and a big statue of yourself. You get to choose from a bunch of explorers, each with their own expertise. Charles Darwin, Amelia Earhart and Rasputin amongst many other historical figures need a statue and it’s up to you. It’s an odd variety of characters, but they fit the time and theme to a degree (although some are bigger stretches than others).
The game takes place from a top down perspective with a hexagonal grid that is shrouded by fog until you get closer. It’s up to you to find the golden pyramid on each expedition and maybe you can find some other riches along the way. It’s not going to be as easy as just strolling up to the pyramid, every step you take you and your group lose sanity. When your Sanity meter is low your group is more susceptible to bad luck. Characters start acting strangely and dangerously to one another, going as far as to eat one another. To find the pyramid there’s a compass, alternating between useful to useless. Other points of interest are represented by question marks on the map.
You can keep your sanity up with food supplies and rest, should you be exploring a desert then you need water to survive too. It becomes key to learn how to manage your food supplies to keep everyone sane and to make effective use of the rest of the tools you’re lugging around uncharted territory. Ropes, machetes and torches help reduce the toll the environments take on your sanity, although depending on your luck food is the most important item next to freshly plundered treasure.
Over the expeditions you’ll accumulate a party of soldiers, traders and locals. Whether it’s villagers you recruit along the way or willing volunteers hoping to join up with a famous explorer or maybe a horse. Party members are important not only for extra inventory slots, but they also play different parts in combat or have skills that can help during other encounters. You can also use them as your guinea pigs when you come across mystery caves or ominous relics filled with liquid. I lost too many people to caves and turned just as many into super humans, every decision feels like a real coin toss and the rewards can make the risk worth taking.
Now back to combat. You’ll encounter enemy creatures and people that you will have to fight, all combat is dictated by dice rolls. Each party member has dice associated with their role, some may have attack dice, others defense or healing (or as far as I could tell). Both sides take turns rolling their dice and you can use different dice combinations to perform more powerful or useful moves over a basic 1 damage attack. To ensure that you always have enough dice to take on some tough dinosaurs or mummys, it’s worth maintaining a full party so you can at least get in two really good moves per turn.
While the main goal is to rush for the golden pyramid in the region to find out your standings compared to your rivals, before you disembark you can pick up an extra objective. Sometimes you’re looking for someone who is lost or doesn’t want to be found, or you could be tasked with finding something to bring back home. Accomplishing these extra goals can help with your reputation, add to your party or help with some coin for supplies.
It’s an addictive game loop that’s easy to get caught up in at first. Before I knew it I was 5 expeditions deep! With the randomised nature some expeditions can be brief but lacking in extra gold, others can be nerve wracking journeys where you can barely move for treasure as you’re trying to outrun a volcano. Knowing you could be sent back to the beginning makes everything more harrowing. Then it happens, you wind up having to start all over. While the areas are randomised, they start feeling very familiar quickly. After several lengthy expeditions you also become very familiar with the different surprise encounters/events, my party was pretty clumsy dropping supplies all the time. Although no matter how many volcanoes and floods I unleashed when I found that pyramid I was off home to trade my ill gotten gains. You can either sell them, hold onto them or gain fame by donating them. Each item you can trade has either more money or fame values attached. It never felt hard to bring enough home that I would be able to earn enough extra fame to put me way ahead of the pack, regardless of how slow I was.
Encounters take a slightly noticeable amount of time to load. It could be because of the randomised nature of what painful fates the game inflicts on your team. Initially it came across like the game was freezing, but then the event popped up and more often than not gave one of my party an infection or killed them outright. When sanity is low or non-existent, it is a very tense time as you try to push your expedition to the golden pyramid. I found my party falling apart (or eaten) when one encounter can suddenly kill a party member and leave another a liability to the group. Encounters work well to maintain a tension that often comes with roguelikes, knowing that everything could be taken from you with one wrong move despite having a very experienced group and all the supplies built up.
A difficult issue to approach in Curious Expedition is how indigenous people are portrayed. In leaning into the olde explorer club coloniser aesthetic, things get awkward. Natives to the areas you explore are treated as simple hut dwellers, to do trade with you for shiny beads for useful food and good standing with the tribe. Raid nearby temples as you devastate everything surrounding it, all for the sake of some more gold trinkets to sell back home. Or simply desecrate ancient structures so you can find some extra locations for you to unleash a fresh new hell upon. It’s apparent from the get go that this is all part of the time the game is set in and that it’s just how things were. While I don’t think it’s ever intended to treat it as a positive thing to do or to expressly make fun of indigenous people, it doesn’t really say anything about what you’re doing and that can feel uncomfortable. Some people will take it all at face value, that it’s all part of the setting, but understandably there will be others that find it a little hard to accept. With the plundering of sacred items and disrespect towards the locals shrines as you leave behind nothing but death and destruction for the sake of the competition and your big shiny statue.
The music reminds me of old DOS games, where the basic visuals wouldn’t have looked that out of place. Both elements gave me a hit of nostalgia, remembering old management games of yore. While there are games using hexagonal grids now, I was still taken back to the day of old mech strategy games on sampler discs and being way out of my depth. On the Switch’s portable screen some detail is lost, but everything you need to see is there and I would struggle to feel motivated to play this game on a big screen. I found Curious Adventure best suited to the handheld mode given it was best played in bursts while expeditions would eat up 10-15 minutes.
Curious Expedition is a curiosity in itself. It can be addictive tearing through the jungles and filling your backpacks with gold, taking them back home for glory. But it also feels like you’re retreading the same adventure nearly every time. For the time Curious Expedition gets its hooks in. It's a decent exploration simulator for a few hours, if you can get past all the uncomfortable colonising as you swindle locals and unleash countless tragedies upon their lands.
Review code provided by Thunderful
