Curious Expedition

The 19th century produced two enduring colonial myths: the noble explorer and the doomed one. Curious Expedition, from Berlin’s Maschinen-Mensch, is built on the space between them. You play as a roster of (loosely) historical figures—Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Harriet Tubman, Charles Darwin—leading a hand-picked party into procedurally generated wildernesses, racing rival explorers for fame and treasure while your sanity, supplies, and morale hemorrhage at every turn.

The pitch sounds like a marketing deck gone feral: a roguelike, an expedition sim, a dice-driven tactical combat system, a reputation economy, permadeath, and multiple win conditions, all wrapped in a hand-drawn pulpy aesthetic. In lesser hands this would be a jumbled mess. What Maschinen-Mensch understood—what so many design studios don’t—is that theme and mechanics can be the same argument. Every system here is about scarcity: of food, of loyalty, of sanity, of time. The game’s darkness isn’t cosmetic. At some point, the game asks you to sacrifice a companion, makes you choose who, and then makes you live with it.

Positioning-wise, it sits alongside the roguelike renaissance of the mid-2010s—FTL, Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire—but refuses to copy any of them. Its dice combat borrows from board games, its overworld owes more to The Oregon Trail than to Diablo, and its sanity system is a moral engine rather than a stat bar. Its Metacritic score of 74 reflects a warm reception, if not an unqualified one.

The learning curve is steep, the runs can feel samey by the fifth expedition, and there are moments where a bad dice roll ends things in a way that feels less “roguelike” and more “robbed.” But when the systems interlock—when you’re plotting a route through a jungle with three units of food, a mutinous party, and a rival two hexes behind you—few games generate this kind of tension.

• Procedural Expedition Worlds: Every run generates a new map—jungle, desert, tundra—with its own biome logic, events, and hazards. No two expeditions route the same way.
• Sanity as a Core Resource: Stress erodes your party’s minds. Low sanity triggers hallucinations, mutiny, and worse. It’s the game’s true difficulty dial, and it’s the design’s sharpest idea.
• Dice-Based Tactical Combat: Combat resolves through rolling and assigning dice to attack, defend, or maneuver. It’s fast, legible, and mercifully brief.
• Historical Personality Roster: Each explorer brings unique traits, starting party compositions, and quest lines that meaningfully reshape strategy.
• Permadeath With Consequences: Losing an expedition costs you standing with the Explorers Club and can permanently alter future runs.

The Core Loop

The structure is a six-expedition campaign, each one a compressed mini-roguelike on a hex map. You move from tile to tile, spending movement points and consuming food with each step. Terrain type determines cost. Every tile you enter triggers something: an animal encounter, a village, a temple, a mystery. The strength of the design is in the economy of movement itself—exploring is spending, and spending is dying. Your route is a budget you’re drafting in real time under uncertainty.

Rival explorers compete on the same map for the same golden tiles and treasure sites. This transforms route planning from solitaire into a semi-competitive negotiation with an invisible opponent, and it’s the reason the game never fully collapses into checklist optimization.

Sanity and the Moral Engine

Sanity is the star. It drains with every hard decision—crossing hostile terrain, losing fights, making choices the game refuses to frame as “good” or “bad.” When it bottoms out, characters gain negative traits permanently: alcoholism, paranoia, mutiny. You can restore it through morally corrosive means (looting shrines, mistreating natives) or preserve your soul and bleed points. The game has opinions about imperialism, and it communicates them through mechanics rather than exposition. That’s sophisticated design—the theme is the system.

Dice Combat

Combat is deliberately lightweight. Each combatant contributes dice; you assign them to hit, block, or special abilities, then resolve. Purists will call it shallow. They’re missing the point: combat is a cost center, not a puzzle box. It’s meant to be survived, not savored, and its brevity keeps the expedition loop moving. A longer tactical layer would strangle the pacing.

Where It Frays

Repetition is the honest critique. The event pool, while large, thins out after several runs, and veteran players start recognizing the branches. Worse, some encounters are luck-gated in ways that bypass skill—a temple trap, a bad animal roll, and your run is over through no decision of yours. Roguelike apologists will shrug; everyone else will curse the screen. The onboarding friction is real, too: the game explains little, and the early expeditions involve drowning in interlocking systems with only a manual’s worth of tooltips for a lifeline.

The hand-drawn, storybook-meets-pulp aesthetic is the game’s calling card. Chunky pixel-adjacent portraits, saturated hex maps, and expressive character animations give each run a board-game physicality. The UI is dense but readable—resource bars, party portraits, and the hex map coexist without chaos, though the Switch’s smaller screen demands squinting at tooltip text. As a 2D game of this scope, it’s light on hardware by design. If there’s a knock, it’s that the audio direction is serviceable rather than memorable.

On Steam, mouse-and-keyboard control suits the route-planning and dice assignment perfectly, and mod support extends longevity. On Nintendo Switch, the game’s turn-based, session-friendly structure is a natural handheld fit—runs break cleanly into commutable chunks, and Nintendo Life’s favorable review echoed this. The cost is legibility: dense text and small hex-map details suffer in handheld mode. Docked play largely resolves this, but the Switch version is best treated as a “playing at home, on the couch” experience rather than a pure commuter pick.

Curious Expedition is a design argument made with confidence: that a roguelike can be about restraint instead of power, about what you’re willing to lose instead of what you can gain. It isn’t flawless—the repetition creeps in, and the dice occasionally betray you in ways no amount of skill can parry. But Maschinen-Mensch built something with a genuine point of view, wrapped in an art style that’s earned its nostalgia rather than rented it. We recommend it to players who want their strategy grim and their choices costly. Lose your party. Blame yourself, then blame the dice, then start another expedition.