The Curious Expedition

The Curious Expedition is a roguelite strategy-adventure set in the late 19th century, developed by Maschinen-Mensch. You pick one of roughly two dozen historical luminaries, from Marie Curie to Rasputin, and race rival explorers across six procedurally generated expeditions to rack up fame, loot golden pyramids, and ideally not lose your mind to a swamp. It sits somewhere between a tabletop board game and a choose-your-own-adventure novel, and that hybrid identity is both its biggest strength and its sharpest limitation. The core loop is deceptively elegant. Each expedition drops you onto a hexagonal grid shrouded in fog of war, and movement itself drains your party's sanity. Every step into a jungle costs more than a step across open plains. Every cave mouth is a gamble: go in without torches and risk injuring a companion, or skip it and miss supplies you desperately need. When question marks appear on tiles, you investigate and hit encounter arenas where combat plays out through a dice system tied directly to your party composition. Warriors bring red attack dice, support companions bring blue utility dice, and rerolls are capped at three, so knowing when to fight and when to bribe or flee with a well-timed whisky trade becomes the whole game. The writing during these encounters is brief, dry, and frequently funny, with a tone that sits closer to a sardonic Victorian travel journal than anything epic. Character selection matters more than it first appears. Darwin is a solid starter for learning combat. Marie Curie rewards pacifist routing. Rasputin shows up with practically nothing and is effectively a hard-mode dare. Each explorer carries unique perks and quirks, and companions you recruit at villages or between expeditions carry their own traits, including ailments like alcoholism or kleptomania that generate unexpected narrative chaos. Between runs you can exchange trophies for fame or funds back in London, feeding into the next expedition's gear and party decisions. The loop pulls hard. It also ships with a free Arctic Expanse DLC adding biomes, characters, and items, plus Steam Workshop mod support that keeps things fresh well past the base content. The honest criticism is this: repetition catches up with you faster than the procedural generation can outrun it. Community consensus across multiple sources holds that encounter variety runs thin by the third or fourth campaign, and the dice-based combat system, while interesting in principle, communicates its rules poorly enough that some players finish the game still not fully understanding it. The in-game tutorial leaves large mechanical gaps that push new players to community guides. There is also a colonial framing that the game leans into with some awareness but does not fully reckon with, which is worth knowing before you sit down with it. If you go in expecting the narrative depth of a CRPG, you will leave a little hungry. The storytelling here is emergent and anecdotal, not authored. For fans of lightweight roguelites, tabletop-adjacent strategy, or anyone who wants their expedition to feel genuinely precarious rather than just statistically inconvenient, The Curious Expedition delivers a real sense of dread and dark comedy in short, intense bursts. It is at its best in the first dozen hours, and the sequel, Curious Expedition 2, refines the formula considerably if you want more mileage. Come for the Rasputin run, stay because a cannibal just ate your best companion on expedition two and now you need to know if you can finish anyway.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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