Video Game / Curious Expedition 2

Curious Expedition 2 is the sequel to the 2015 roguelike RPG Curious Expedition. While the core gameplay remains intact, this installment adds a campaign with a story mode and swaps out the Historical Domain Characters with character classes. Two character classes are available at first and six more are unlockable, each one has unique perks and gameplay which greatly effects party dynamics.

In 1886, Victoria Malin is on an expedition with two companions on an uncharted island. They discover a portal to another dimension which Malin believes is from a lost civilization that left technology that could be used to better civilization. Malin is the director of the Paris Exposition and the story campaign has you assist her in her quest to uncover more lost technology.

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This game contains examples of:

• Action Girl: Since gender is purely aesthetic, all companions can be potentially female and same goes with expedition leaders. Even your rivals can be female.
• All Asians Wear Conical Straw Hats: The Black Flag Pirate may be given one upon generation in the class selection menu; however, no other Asian characters are seen wearing them.
• Adventurer's Club: Three are present in Paris and each expedition is sponsored by a club of their choosing. Every completed expedition adds experience which levels up the chosen club, unlocking unique gear and party classes.
• Animation Bump: The original game had retro 8 Bit graphics; this one has lavish Tintin-inspired graphics hand-drawn by graphic novelist Garen Ewing.
• Anti-Hoarding: Even more so than in the first game. All your unused equipment is sold back in Paris after each expedition, while your funds are only for that specific expedition and come from your sponsors, rather than your own pocket. Short for weapons and a few bits of gear, you can't keep anything between expeditions.
• Ambiguously Brown: Several player classes and companion classes are often this, in contrast to others with explicitly stated ethnicity.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Items that provide defense are laughably inefficient. In a game where most basic attacks are going to deal 10 damage or so, a rare, expensive, and fully upgraded breastplate adding a mere 8 defense is completely useless.
  • Subverted in case of defense that comes from dice combinations, as they can provide respectable values in range of 40-60 defense, enough to soak up two strong attacks or negate entirely a swarm of weak enemies.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: Firearms don't have any advantage over any other weapon; in fact, a fully upgraded melee weapon will be more powerful than a less upgraded gun. This is obviously done for balance issues, otherwise, most fights would be awfully one-sided in the player's favor.
• Automatic Crossbows: The Chu Ko Nu is an unlockable weapon, modeled after one of the most famous real life examples. The Pictish crossbow is similar.
• Badass Preacher: The Missionary, Confucian Master, Taoist Monks, and various Shaman companions are all capable of being leveled into formidable warriors.
• Behemoth Battle: If you have a Dinosaur, Jellyfish, or Giant Tortoise in your party, this will happen if you battle any of the various giant beasts.
• BFG: The Elephant Gun is an unlockable rifle that is the biggest firearm by a landslide. It is so hard-hitting that the wielder is stunned for a turn after using it.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: There is a variety of overgrown arthropods, ranging from bird-sized wasps and ending at bus-sized centipedes.
• Bilingual Bonus: The bar in the Paris hub is called La Boussole Cassée, meaning "the broken compass" in French.
• Bird People: The Shores of Taishi DLC adds the Peacock Tribe, an Islander type consisting of peacock people.
• Blade Enthusiast: Sikh Warriors have bonus damage with blade class weapons.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Shotguns. They deal loads of damage and are more likely to get a die with multiple attack than any other weapon.
  • The basic, opening item of the Royal Avalon Society is a walking stick that decreases the sanity cost of moving in open terrain. It saves an enormous amount of sanity in the long run.
  • As long as you have a pack animal, a common Crate is pretty much indispensable, as it provides up to 11 additional slots, essentially doubling what your expedition can carry. Saddle bags are just as good, but far less common.
  • Pouch is a human equivalent of Crate, adding just as many slots, and obviously, you are more likely to have more humans than pack animals in your group.
  • Binoculars extend your view range. And unlike other such items, they stack, so you can carry up to four of them, allowing to reveal entire region right at ship's landing. This makes navigation significantly easier, even if they don't add any other effects.
  • The Butterfly Swords from the Taishi Academy, which gives decent damage and stun abilities at the cost of replacing the equipped character's inate dice. Put them on someone like the Travelling Quack (which has dice that are situational at best or downright useless at worst) or Sikh Warrior (who gets bonus damage with melee weapons) and the majority of your combats will be much easier. Plus they're literally the first unlock at that club, meaning you can get them fairly early on.
• Body Horror: The Pale Faces ruler could give the Master run for his money when it comes to being deformed something. In fact, your expedition leader will refuse to accept this thing could be human or more likely, a group of people.
• Bottomless Magazines: Gun-wielding characters have an endless supply of ammunition, a major relief considering how the game treats inventory.
• Brits Love Tea: The only way to get Calming Tea when gearing up for an expedition is to have a sufficiently high rank in the British Royal Avalon Society and them being the sponsor of your trek.
• Chased by Angry Natives: If your Standing on an expedition gets low enough, the Islanders will pursue you in parties until you escape on your ship.
• Cigar Chomper: The Big Game Hunter always has a cigar in their mouth, which enforces their tough as nails image.
• Crystal Skull: These appear as rare magic weapons.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The truffle pig has a cooldown of 40 days and can find random Shop Fodder or low-grade sanity items. A very, very long expedition will last maybe 200 days.
  • Any weapon with self-stun effect, especially when it lasts more than a single round.
• The Corruption: Whatever the source, the portal world is twisted by it inside and out, and it can even affect your expedition. The items from that place will almost always be "Corrupted" instead of the regular version.
• Dem Bones: A recent free DLC added skeleton pirates that may be randomly found on any map.
• Devious Daggers: Scoundrel companions have an attack consisting of thrown daggers.
• Dinosaur Doggie Bone: The Treasure Corgi may occasionally dig up dinosaur parts.
• Distinguishing Mark: Malin has a prominent wine stain birthmark on her face that makes her instantly recognizable.
• Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe: Malin often smokes a calabash pipe in cut scenes, suiting for a renowned explorer and director of the World's Fair. Additionally, a pipe may be seen in an ashtray on a table at the Royal Avalon Society clubhouse.
• Dodge the Bullet: Some classes are capable of dodging attacks.
• Domesticated Dinosaurs: Islanders on maps with dinosaurs will usually have these, the player can recruit them from villages or barter for one from a beast master. It is also possible to domesticate wild dinosaurs with a dice check or raise one from an egg.
• Dual Wielding: The Butterfly Swords are an unlockable two-handed weapon.
• Elephant Graveyard: These appear on any map with elephants; it is possible to roll dice to loot ivory from them, but there is a risk of all elephants turning aggressive if the dice fail.
• Friendly Skeleton: The aforementioned skeleton pirates when they aren't aggressive. They can be traded with and can even be recruited as companions.
• Guns vs. Swords: Battles against pirates and rival explorers will often result in this. The advanatage is always given to the better-leveled party.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: The game takes place in the years leading up to the Paris Exposition which the Eiffel Tower was built for; at the start of the game there is no Eiffel Tower, and it is more complete with each act.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Duke, who is a gigantic, sentient sea cucumber (or at least claims to be). He's completely harmless and in fact benevolent for your expedition... as long as you have something for him to eat.
  • The ruler of Pale Faces is a massive boil of tumorous tissue, looking like a pile of bodies fused together. Unless you really need it to revert a Pace Face into a human, do not take its mask off.
• Eldritch Location: The portal realm is completely surreal this time around. Rather than the relatively tame prehistoric land from the first game, you get meat trees, Pale Faces, everything being in sick or just bizarre colours, and you have to find in this mess your way back to reality, as the portal you took to get there was a one-way trip. If this wasn't enough, you can end up with one of your party members being corrupted by the fog, which has lasting consequences even if you manage to heal them out of it.
• Elves vs. Dwarves: The Salamanders and Mole People are bitter rivals; the former are one with nature and live in the jungle while the latter are high-tech and live in underground cities.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Once you unlock prehistoric islands, the game is actively trying to wipe out your party with a combination of damaging or impassable terrain, powerful predators, and random events like volcanic eruptions and resulting fire.
• Everything's Louder with Bagpipes: Bagpipes are an equippable weapon found on Avalon maps; they boost morale for allies and cause weakness in enemies.
• Everyone Is Bi: The player character and a companion or two companions may fall in love, regardless of gender. Of course, gender is purely aesthetic in the game anyway.
• Eyepatch of Power: Victoria wears an eyepatch where her right eye should be, and she's an Action Girl adventurer.
• Fantastic Anthropologist: The Anthropologist player class gains fame from studying indigenous peoples found on expeditions, which includes sentient non-human tribes.
• Feathered Fiend: Velociraptors (correctly portrayed will full plumage) and Giant Birds.
• Five-Token Band: With how diverse the classes are, it's highly likely that your party will end up as one of these.
• Flare Gun: The player may purchase flares or find them on the map; they reveal a section of unvisited land. Sailors come with free flares that can be used every 30 days (and fewer days as they're leveled up).
• Fog of Doom: The outskirts of the maps are covered in the Ominous Fog, which slowly, but surely expands toward the center of each map. If you end up travelling through it, it costs you huge amount of sanity and can also cause a fog infection to your companions if you cross too many tiles covered by it. The fog can't be in any way dispersed or removed (except for a very rare spell with a very small radius), thus effectively it works like the black hole from the first game — it will never stop spreading and eventually consume the whole map.
• Forced Transformation: Using a moon stone has a possibility of turning one of your companions into a were-panther.
• Forced Tutorial: When starting a new game for the first time, you are not only forced to play the campaign first, but the first mission of it is a pure, rail-roaded tutorial — useful when you're a newcomer, but absolutely terrible when you've played the original or are replaying the game for the n-th time.
• Fungus Humongous: They are back from the original, only this time they are deliberately creepy and scary, rather than whimsical and fairy-tale like.
• Gang of Hats: The aforementioned Explorer's Clubs:
  • The Royal Avalon Society is the most conventional of the three, and their items are the most well-rounded. They are presumably British and their clubhouse is decorated with artifacts from all over the world. Unique companions they offer are the Sikh Warrior, Corgi Treasure Hunter, and Grail Knight.
  • Lux Labs is a steampunk themed club that offers a variety of high-tech gadgets. Thomas Edison is their founder and their clubhouse features robotics and American decor. Unique companions they offer are the Engineer and Kinetographer.
  • The Taishi Academy is a martial arts club that offers several Chinese items. Their clubhouse is a library with mysteriously floating bookshelves. Unique companions they offer are the Confucian Master and Taoist Monk.
• Going Native: In the end of the campaign mode, Victoria Malin decides to join the locals of the final island and learn as much as possible from them — that is, if you choose not to kill her. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue directly invokes this trope.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: The raptors are featured with full plumage in line with the current consensus in paleontology, in contrast to the original game where they resembled the scaled ones popularized by Jurassic Park. They are tameable and can become a beloved member of your party and bond with other companions.
• The Great Repair: The third campaign mission ends up with rebuilding a wreck of an old pirate ship using the super-science engine of the precursors and jury-rigging a propeller. You get to keep it then for the rest of the game.
• Headbutting Pachy: It's possible to have one in your party or fight them in the wild, and most of their dice involve headbutts.
• Handicapped Badass: Sailor recruits routinely have a peg leg — and it doesn't hinder them in the slightest.
• Harder Than Hard: The Director Mode, set explicitly after the events of the campaign. It's the same gameplay loop as in the first game, but the difficulty of encounters and even map tile generation in amped up deliberately to kill your expedition dead.
• Hidden Elf Village: Most of the native settlements are depicted this way, but the Avalon DLC takes it up to eleven and features relict populations of Picts, living cut off from the outside world. The real life Picts disappeared over 1000 years ago.
• Hot Gypsy Woman: The more sensitively named Roma Traders; they wear the stereotypical attire, but are an unusual aversion because they are merchants rather than dancers or fortune tellers.
• Humungous Mecha: Lux Labs has a giant horse robot on display; sadly, it doesn't do anyting.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Attacks are always landed on their selected target.
• Improperly Placed Firearms: Islander villages occasionally will have guns available to trade; why they would trade guns to outsiders instead of keeping them for their warriors is never explained. This can even happen with pacifist tribes.
• Insistent Terminology: Islanders, not natives. Even when you're Beneath the Earth or in an Eldritch Location.
• Instant-Win Condition: Zig-Zagged. If a given expedition requires you to find something or do cartographic measurements, then fulfilling that objective is an instant win. However, if your task is to find a specimen of animal or orchid, you have to backtrack to your ship.
• Instant Death Bullet: Guns can kill an opponent on first shot their their damage is equal or higher than an enemy's full health.
• Inventory Management Puzzle:
  • Since there is a variety of ways to increase the size of your inventory, it eventually can lead to situations where you are carrying gear that is currently not in use, but useful situationally. There is also abusing the fact that unlike the original game, your ship's inventory is both 100% safe and unlimited. The trick is to always juggle your inventory in such a way to not end up with encumbrance penalties.
  • There is also the fact that various objects are now equippable and serve different purposes in different situations, creating another layer of inventory management, as you might want to carry a rifle around, but otherwise have a machete or a waking stick equipped.
• Island of Mystery: Rather than visiting locations all across the globe, your expeditions are going to these, or at least start on their surface. They are implied to be mobile or even appearing out of thin air.
• Knightly Sword and Shield: Grail Knights provide shield abilities to the entire party and are best equipped with blades.
• Lady of War: Female player characters can become this and any female companion of a combat oriented class is.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Since the maps are procedurally generated, it's a given. However, the highland maps are probably the most prominent example, as they involve a lot of back-and-forth on different elevations, which depletes sanity. If you are lucky, there will be a neat passage or a ravine to follow. If not, you will soon start facing debuffs from 0 sanity.
  • Gear can have an "Improved" prefix, and as a result, having better combat results or offering a stronger passive bonus. It is purely up to chance if, when, or for what item this prefix will load.
  • If you are very lucky, a wishing well, a portal world, or maybe even a random trader will have some equipment or gear that's otherwise only accessible at very high rank in a given explorer's club.
• Lightening Gun: One is unlockable from Lux Labs.
• Lizard Folk: Well, amphibian folk, the Salamanders. They share all the traits of the trope regardless of taxonomy.
• Machete Mayhem: Machete is now a weapon instead of usable equipment, dealing significant melee damage. It still decreases the costs of crossing through jungle tiles, but doesn't cut them down.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Gear and companions can be upgraded, and the higher level they have, the more faces their die has. A level 1 revolver will have a 2/6 chance to roll anything at all, while dealing pitiful damage, but the same revolver, once maxed out, is a respectable weapon with its entire die having faces, instead of blanks.
  • Taxonomist starts as the weakest class of expedition leaders. However, once fully upgraded he has a powerful attack and passive ability that turns otherwise Shop Fodder that are animal trophies into decent source of fame. He also starts with a donkey (and thus large inventory) and a cook, meaning all the hunted down animals can be turned into quality meals (once the cook levels up, that is). Same goes with his starting weapon, the ornate revolver, which at max level is one of the better weapons in the whole game.
• Masochist's Meal: Certain sanity items can't be eaten unless you have almost completely depleted the meter. This includes canned food, snails, moss, and a few similar meals that at best, are awfully bland, and at worst, are barely edible in the first place.
• Mayincatec: Several islands have Islanders with these motifs played straight, but averted by the Nahua Seeker player class.
• Medieval Prehistory: Mayincatec themed Islanders are often founded on Prehistoric maps; they have the most sophisticated buildings of any Islander type.
• Mole Men: Found on subterranean maps. Played very straight, they are more technologically advanced than other Islanders and are heavily involved with mining.
• Mushroom Samba: Hallucinogenic Toad restores a whopping 40 sanity, but also results in you seeing things that aren't there for the rest of the expedition.
• National Geographic Nudity: Female Islanders often go topless, but their nipples are always covered by strategically placed necklaces, unlike in the original game were nipples were often shown.
• Non-Human Sidekick: Compared with the original, the new ones include humanoid salamanders, Mole Men, Kobolds, and Pale Faces.
• Obvious Rule Patch: A variety of gameplay mechanics and items present in the original have been reworked or outright removed. The most notable ones include:
  • Rework on portals, which went from a free dinosaur early on to suicide mission best avoided entirely.
  • Significant decrease of damage output of dynamite, to make it far less viable at cleaning large stacks of enemies.
  • There are no more spells to summon resting places, reveal map, freely move, or teleport to a desired location.
  • The game has hardcore Anti-Hoarding mechanics, which prevents your expedition from gathering useful items for later use, as everything is sold back upon return to Paris.
  • Each round of combat decrease your sanity by 1 and then exponentially more, thus making it a top priority to wrap things up fast (it also prevents milking healing abilities against weak foes).
  • Everyone can cook now, which is great. However, without a cook in your expedition, the results are going to be just charred meat. Still better than nothing.
  • You can simply tame wild animals to use as your pack mules, rather than rely on the complex barter-and-favour system to even try getting some from the natives.
  • All companions eventually get a fully-upgraded die and the dice system has been reworked to simply require the right colour rather than a specific face to overcome a challenge. This significantly decreases the difficulty when compared with the original game and rescues certain companions from the scrappy heap.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Very goblin like, much more similar to traditional depictions than the lizard folk variety found in D&D, they are also hermaphrodites much like the Salamanders. They are recruitable companions and can be met in the wild on Avalon maps.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Because they are were-panthers. The affected person involuntarily changes into a form of a feral animal during full moon. However, they retain control of their actions and that form levels-up separately to the regular, human version. If you ever needed a situational Lightning Bruiser, look no further.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Pale Faces are of the Technically-Living Zombie variety, but their minds are twisted by The Corruption and they slowly turn into Humanoid Abominations.
• Precursors: The original creators of Being Engine, along with all of the related technology. The few tribes you meet in the campaign are descendants of their servants and explicitly not the same group as the precursors themselves.
• Prehistoria: The aptly named Prehistoric islands, where dinosaurs are found.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Sikh Warriors and Islander combat classes.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Most companion classes can be either male or female and it doesn't affect anything.
• Rare Random Drop: Items that have the "Improved" prefix. There is no real or reliable way of securing them and they are almost always random loot.
• Real Men Eat Meat: Averted by the Sikh Warriors, who are vegetarian and will always politely decline when meat or fish is eaten.
• The Rival: At the start of a campaign, you will get assigned a rival in the form of some famous individual.
  • The final map of the campaign starts with Rivals Team Up, to stop your boss from accidentaly blowing up the world.
• Robot Buddy: The Grail Knights are mechanical companions that may be recruited from the Royal Avalon Society or the tavern; occasionally, one will offer to accomodate you for an expedition and won't take up a party slot.
• Saharan Shipwreck: This time around, they are Napoleonic-era British ships. They still, however, provide you with dynamite.
• Skeleton Crew: Shipwrecks are often occupied by these.
• Skeletal Musician: It is possible to equip a skeleton pirate companion with bagpipes.
• Snake Oil Salesman: As a recruit class, no less!
• Space-Filling Path: The game automatically calculates your path to avoid various dangers and keep the sanity cost at the lowest possible value. This means you can end up on a two-week long trek around two tiles of desert, which you could cross for 1 point of sanity more than the roundabout detour. The only way to avoid such a situation is to manually plot the entire path through the "bad" tiles.
• Steampunk: The game laregely drops the general Jungle Opera trappings of the original for direct steampunk vibes, especially in the Paris hub.
• Stock Ness Monster: These appear in Avalon maps; some will attack the player on sight, but others are friendly and will give the player treasure in exchange for tribute.
• Street Urchin: One of the companion classes, they have the unique ability to steal from settlements and merchants if they can roll sufficient green dice.
• Stylistic Suck: The first game was a Roguelike done in pixel art. The sequel is evoking the style of a Flash game, with garish colours, limited animation, and very detailed, but cartoony backgrounds.
• Sword and Fist: Most classes have fist attacks by default; when equipped with a sword, there is the option of a character using attacks with both depending on what dice are rolled.
• Tanuki: These appear as foes and companions in the Shores of Taishi DLC, gag testicles and all.
• Tattoo as Character Type: The Pictish Tatooed Warrior companions are the Cultural type.
• Tribal Facepaint: Human Islanders often are painted in colorful designs.
• Too Awesome to Use: Subverted by the game design. Since there are extensive Anti-Hoarding mechanics in place, you should always make use of items in your cargo. Once the expedition is over, you won't be allowed to keep them anyway — they will be automatically sold back for fame, which, unlike the first game, is virtually useless.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: Certain foodstuffs require your expedition to have already a very low sanity to use them at all — and they only work as an immediate emergency, being usually capped at 30 (or sometimes even 10) sanity, on the scale of 0-100.
• Unstable Equilibrium:
  • Getting any weapon or companion with a die that offers a multiple-target attack. Once you have it and upgrade it a bit, it will carry you through all combat encounters, because multiple-target attacks are so much better and more efficient. Combine such an attack with a companion with the proper specialty (like Sailor using a pirate cutlass or British Soldier armed with a shotgun, both getting +50% more damage) and a single attack can wipe-out an entire group of enemies.
  • Getting a Street Rat companion, due to their unique ability to steal things from various locations. While the outcome is randomised, even if you don't get anything useful, you can then barter it away for what you need or want. And since that ability has a special, all-sided green die, it makes various green challenges (like searching for extra treasure in a shrine or entering a cave without a torch) easier or even automatic pass, too.
• Was Once a Man: Pale Faces and by implication, their ruler. It is possible for one of your companions to get turned into one of them, and reverting the process might be impossible if you are particularly unlucky.
• Zeppelins from Another World: The Paris skyline often features zeppelins and smaller airships, which is one of the first indicators of the steampunk setting.

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