Curious Expedition has been around for a while. Originally released in 2016, it’s finally wound its way through the jungles, deserts, and tundra to the Nintendo Switch, courtesy of Maschinen-Mensch and publisher Thunderful. At its heart, this is a roguelike adventure game with a vintage pixel graphics look and 19th century sensibilities. Visually, it’s very minimalist, but don’t let that fool you! There’s a lot going on here under the surface!
In Curious Expedition, you’re one of a group of rival adventurers out for fame and glory with the Explorer’s Club. This is pretty much what happened in Britain in the 19th century in real life, with a plethora of well-funded actual adventurers in pith helmets with giant entourages actually wandered the world, raiding everything they could find (yes, that’s a rather one-sided and distilled version of actual historical events, but hey, this is a game review). Of course, there are a few additions with the Curious Expedition that really spice things up on top of the actual exploration.
Your goal is to survive six expeditions and get back with the most fame of any of your rival explorers. That’s a tall order though, as everything and everyone is out to get you. Your options for explorers range through history as a wide variety of famous historical figures, many of which were not actual explorers, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Marie Curie, and even Grigori Rasputin! Each has their own unique set of skills, strengths and weaknesses that will allow you to survive or perish based entirely on your choices and the randomly generated expedition. Survive, and gain a permanent (at least for the course of this set of expeditions) perk that will allow you more latitude in the next trek.
Once you start out, the game looks more like a board game than anything else. It’s hexagon-based play with tiny figures walking across a massive landscape, exposing it bit by bit and trying to find a Golden Pyramid so they can return for riches, fame and glory. There are temples to explore, stone circles, animal graveyards, villages, research stations and more scattered about the map. Visit any location and risk losing members of your party, sanity, and more. The long you travel, the more sanity you lose, eventually affecting the loyalty of your companions, who might abandon you, attack, or even go crazy and cannibalize each other (seriously). More than anything, gameplay in the Curious Expedition feels like an updated, more complex and addictive version of The Oregon Trail than anything else. But instead of dysentery, you have ancient curses, psychotic tribesmen, and hungry jaguars and polar bears at every turn!
The backstory, also randomly generated, tends towards the fantastic and supernatural, with your choices to raid temples and caves tossing out curses or natural disasters. Steal the wrong thing from the wrong place and you could trigger the complete destruction of a region by volcanoes! But hey, that statue you stole is worth a bit of extra fame and those villagers were just savages anyway, right?
Even your choices to help your companions have an impact. Don’t help your lieutenant whisk away the native he’s fallen in love with from under the tribe’s nose? He’s no longer loyal to you and could turn on you as your sanity drops while exploring. Help him and risk angering the tribesmen who are sheltering you on your journey. Every decision has a significant impact on gameplay.
There’s also a fair amount of combat in Curious Expedition. Animals and creatures hunt you at every turn through the wilderness, their territories clearly delineated in red along your path, and you have no choice but to cross their territory. Combat also accentuates the board game feel with a smattering of dice for attack and defense. Combine dice to create combos which you use to attack the enemies slashing and clawing their way for your throats. Combat is tough, unforgiving and random. You could easily lose your entire party to a few bad dice rolls. Don’t worry, there’s even an achievement for running away, which you’ll be doing a lot!
Loot as much as you can, run like the wind, trade baubles to the natives for gems, and eventually, you’ll find the Golden Pyramid. Simply enter and your expedition is over, returning in triumph to the Explorer’s Club! If you’re smart, you sent some of your loot back at a waypoint to keep your rather small inventory free and you managed to spirit away some loot, which you can choose to trade for either money or fame. Fame is important, but don’t ignore the cash, because you’ll be unable to outfit your next expedition properly if you’re underfunded! Each area varies wildly in the type of environment and gear required, so make sure you buy and take the correct items for the part of the world you’re going to!
Curious Expedition is a game that’s perfect for the pick-up-and-play style of the Switch. Wander through an expedition, take a break, have a coffee, and come back where you left off. It can be played in short bursts here and there, as well as more extended sessions. There’s a fair amount of humor in the gameplay, much of it surprisingly dark, and the script, especially for a rogue-like with randomized story, is particularly compelling. You are always waiting for the next shoe to drop, to see what your choices have wrought, and what your companions might do. You may have to eat your pack animals. You may have to kill your friends. You may anger the gods. But damn it, you’ll get the recognition you deserve!
As you play, you’ll unlock more playable characters, up to twenty-one of them. Curious Expedition has a wide roster with a wide variety of traits but it is sheer luck if the places you choose to visit sync up well with the explorer you’ve chosen or the companions that accompany you. Making it to the sixth expedition at all is quite an accomplishment as, more often than not, you’ll end up dying alone, abandoned by everyone and moldering away, regretting your life choices. Each one gets larger and harder, and by the end, you’ve been put through the ringer. If you manage to make it that far, and you definitely won’t on your first few tries, and finish the final expedition, you simply win the game with a bit of a finishing story for your explorer and then start over. Curious Expedition is more about the journey than the conclusion and there’s not a huge revelation or bonus for completing the game.
There aren’t many board game style video games that are really fun. The majority of them are either loosely based on an actual board game, or tediously run about a board on a stylized version of a board game. Curious Expedition however, is that rare game that manages to take the elements of a successful board game, distill them into a playable video game, and make that video game both enjoyable and compelling, to the point that you’ll want to come back again and again. This is casual gaming at its best and is well worth spending your hard earned $15 on!
This review was based on a digital copy of Curious Expedition provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was absolutely fantastic on both! Curious Expedition is also available for Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Linux, and MacOs. Go grab your pith helmet and a native guide and get exploring!