YMMV / Curious Expedition

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Some of the characters were in fact explorers even if they today aren't known for such, the most notable example is Crowley who was an accomplished mountaineer.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The main source of humor in the game comes from picking up pulp fiction and dialing it up to absurdity. This way, all those things that didn't really age well since the Victorian era and early 20th century can be instead turned into jokes.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There is a handful of strategies and decisions that make the game significantly easier (or even possible to win at all), leading to repetition each and every playthrough.
  • Hunting parties consisting of British Soldier and Cook can almost completely ignore Sanity and actively seek confrontation with animals after the first two expeditions. Due to the combination, each combat will instantly restore 25 points of Sanity and provide a lot of meat. Once cooked, it grants 15 points per unit.
  • Reloading a new game until the expedition starts with a mission to find a missing wife of a wealthy foreigner. Unlike other starting quests, this one provides a small fund bonus upon completion, making a huge difference in the early game.
  • Special companions (Diplomat Jim Sterling, Tim Timster with Luis, and the yeti) are just so much better than anything of regular classes, you're going to get them in 9 out of 10 cases. Sterling is the most obvious example, especially if you have a Parsi Trader in your party, since he has better dice (not only upgraded, but of two different types), more Toughness, and never starts with any ailments, making him far more useful.
  • Regardless if you want to keep Tim Timster as a member of your expedition, his dog, Luis, doesn't use a companion slot. Not only that, but he has unique dice: one has an eye icon, just like support (blue) die, the other comes with a special taunt icon. This way you have a half-decent companion that adds useful die, is effective in combat, counts as an animal (so isn't affected by the various nasty results of depleted sanity), and doesn't take a slot. And there is absolutely no downside of dismissing Timster while still in London's port, while keeping his dog.
    • And if you happen to play as Alexandra David-Neel, Luis is a must-have, since she can level him up into the most useful companion she can have, with his support die having 4 eye icons and gaining second, powerful animal combat die, making the tiny dog act as if having upgraded blue and two basic red dice. All while Timster is pretty much useless due to being stuck at first level, so you will ditch him under Davis-Neel.
  • Due to the way how difficulty is scaled with each expedition, if a second or third expedition gets a map with a portal to another dimension (or a spell to summon a portal is gained by that point), going for that portal will outweight any other considerations. Portal worlds have Lizard Folk native villages, allowing to recruit potent dinosaurs into the party, which are superior to any other pack animals. Portal worlds also have a very high chance of spawning shrines, providing blessings to human companions. And since they are visited so early on, they are safe(ish) even for pacifist expeditions. From the 4th expedition onward, portal worlds are usually too dangerous to bother, leading to the reverse situation — avoidance of going through the portal.
• First Installment Wins: The first game received generally favourable reviews and was well-received by players. The sequel, meanwhile, is highly divisive, both in general reception and even within the fandom.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The explorers aren't really balanced against each other. Some start with flat-out better perks, items, and/or followers than the rest. This also means there are a few greatly underpowered examples. And there are also followers themselves, with few types of them paling by comparison:
  • Aleister Crowley starts with not one, but three Cultists. Cultists are by far the worst party members, as they come with only red dice and their perk doesn't prevent the nasty effects of Coca Leaves, all while each cultist can at any given time turn into an Abomination. If that wasn't enough, Crowley's perk, Occult Vision, reveals Stone Circles upon loading a new map. If no circles were generated — tough luck! To add to the let-down, to even unlock Crowley, one must finish each expedition with positive standing (a near-impossible task), which just leaves the bitter taste given how damn useless he is.
  • Dion Fortune isn't bad on her own, but she's painfully average for an explorer that requires a Non-Standard Game Over to even unlock. And triggering said game-over might even be impossible, as it requires specific circumstances to match at the map start to even try it (it's still up to chance if it will happen). For all the trouble, you get an explorer that has a basic, common perk of doubtful usefulness, lackluster dice and the starting companions are poorly matched (Scottish Soldier is good for combat-oriented gameplay, Missionary is only good for a Pacifist Run). She also starts with coca leaves as her sanity-restoring item, making the Scottish Soldier's perk useless. All of this would be simply mediocre normally, but the requirements to get Fortune unlocked make it not worth even trying - and that after one figures how to even unlock her in the first place.
  • As already noted, Cultists are more harmful than useful. Their perk doesn't prevent bad ailments from using Coca Leaves, their dice is crap, and there is a never-ending risk they will turn into an Abomination and start causing serious trouble, like eating other party members or starting a fight against rest of the party.
  • Unless the pacifist route is picked, Missionaries are just as bad. They provide a single, unupgraded green dice regardless of level, have the lowest Toughness of all followers, can't lift too much, and they might randomly lose one of their perks, meaning resting in Missions will require payment anyway. In a pacifist run, however, the extra sanity they provide is more than enough to overcome other issues, but only a handful of explorers start with both a missionary and a setup for a pacifist run.
  • Majority of sidequest are just not worth doing, due to their reward not only being worth less than the costs needed to fulfil them in the first place, but other factors further making the profits insufficient to cover the risk of derailing the expedition. Stealing the idol from a village, tracking down a specific hyena or finding and rescuing a lost explorer are all quests that, while technically feasible, aren't really worth the hassle, while they can also potentially lead to a TPK due to pure random factors. This also comes with the fact that accepting quests and then failing them can affect your reputation negatively. This can go as far as simply declining them is better than ever bothering with any of them. On the flip side, always accepting the deserter quest is an easy source of extra cash, especially since his medal (the proof of killing him) was reworked into a weightless item all the way back in the beta, thus not even taking a slot in the inventory, but if that quest happens past the 3rd expedition, the reward won't really matter by then.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The game during its development was just plain unforgiving, expecting full expertise of game mechanics to even try getting past the 4th expedition. Couple of rebalances and utilities right before the release and additional changes later on brought down the difficulty spike to more managable levels, so it is now possible to reliably finish it on normal difficulty once being familiar with game mechanics and luck-out on easy at the first try.
  • The Hard difficulty is still just as deadly as the game used be as a whole, and managing to finish even a single run with it is an achievement by itself. There is an achievement for doing this with each and every explorer, currently completed by below 1% of all people that ever played the game.
  • On the flip-side, the early builds of the game allowed you to cheat by changing values of your inventory and funds, allowing things like endless stack of Targetted Teleportation spell or clearing the London shop regardless of how the prior expedition went. This no longer works after the Arctic update.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Harriet Tubman's unique perk used to be one of the most useless and gimmick-based, making her in turn one of the most underwhelming explorers to play as. This got eventually reworked, making the perk proc not only more often, but without the scrappy part of it - having to sleep at any of the resting spots. The free and regular location reveals can significantly ease exploring the map, gaining upgrade points and also narrowing down the compass' reading, making the perk work like a free-of-charge weather baloons.
• That One Achievement:
  • Unlocking platinum frames for all explorers. This requires to unlock all explorers first^note Which will take at least two successfully finished runs of the game, as Dion Fortune is unlocked by Non-Standard Game Over, plus Lovecraft is notoriously hard to unlock in the current build, requiring to find and loot the Necronomicon and then win the game by being first in the overall score. With each of them. While playing on Hard difficulty. This includes playing as all of the low-tier characters. Currently less than 1% of all players managed to pull this off.
  • To a far lesser extent, the achievement for resurrecting 10 of the dead expedition members, as it is a Luck-Based Mission — you not only have to lose someone and survive the loss, but then find the right location on the map and have sufficient amount of treasures to sacrifice to bring the dead character back.
• That One Sidequest: The lost explorer quest. First, you need to locate him, which by itself can distract from the expedition. Much worse, he's a cannibal with Horror Hunger that is also useless in combat. And he will try to eat your companions. And you can't stop him. The Millstone barely describes it all. All for low payoff once you somehow drag him back to civilisation (where it's implied he will kill his wife, the original questgiver). To make it all worse, he is Obviously Evil, but your own character seems to be completely oblivious to the fact. If this quest happens anywhere after 2nd expedition, your best option is to simply decline it.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: A lot of walkthroughs and tutorials refer to Dion Fortune with masculine pronouns.

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