Renowned Explorers: International Society

Renowned Explorers: International Society is a turn-based strategy game with a thick RPG coating, set in a pulpy Victorian era of lost temples, rival expeditions, and academic glory. Abbey Games built something genuinely unusual here: a tactics game where your emotional stance in combat matters as much as your action economy. You pick a crew of three explorers from a roster of distinct characters, each with their own stats, abilities, and personality archetypes, then set off on procedurally generated map expeditions to collect treasures, renown, and research points before a rival beats you to the finish line. The social combat system is the headline feature, and it earns the attention. Rather than defaulting to a binary of hit-or-flee, every encounter has a mood track that shifts between Friendly, Aggressive, and Devious. Your choices during a fight push that mood in one direction or another, and the dominant mood determines what abilities your crew can use effectively. Bring a silver-tongued Diplomat and a roguish Trickster, and you can talk wild animals into submission, bribe bandits into standing down, or embarrass rival explorers into retreating. Bring three brawlers and you can just punch everything. Both approaches are valid, but the game clearly has a soft spot for creative, non-violent solutions, rewarding them with better loot and higher renown multipliers. It feels like the design team asked "what if diplomacy was mechanically interesting" and then actually followed through. Character synergies are where the build variety lives, and it holds up well past the early hours. Crew composition determines your strategic options far more than any individual item or upgrade. A crew built around Devious mood play feels completely different from one leaning on Friendly buffs or brute Aggressive pressure. The explorer roster is varied enough that repeat runs genuinely change how you approach the same map layouts. Expeditions are procedurally assembled from handcrafted nodes, which keeps things fresh without feeling totally random. There are also story events scattered throughout that offer branching dialogue choices, and while they rarely reach the narrative density of a proper CRPG, they have enough character and dry wit to make reading them worthwhile. The weaker spots are predictable for the genre. Late-game expeditions start to blur together once you have internalized the mood system, and some runs feel decided more by map luck than by your skill or build choices. The meta-progression layer, where you unlock new explorers and upgrades between expeditions, is functional but a little thin. If you come in expecting the narrative weight of a traditional RPG, the game will feel shallow. The writing is charming but episodic, not cumulative. There are no arcs that payoff across a full campaign the way a good CRPG earns its final chapters. What you get instead is a very replayable, systems-forward game that respects your time by keeping individual runs brisk. For players who like their tactics games wrapped in personality, and who appreciate when a developer bothers to make peaceful solutions mechanically rewarding rather than just cosmetically different, Renowned Explorers offers something that still feels distinct years after release. The 92% positive rating on Steam is not an accident. It is a focused, well-executed game that knows exactly what it wants to be. Monika, Scout Team