Curious Expedition
The Curious Expedition is yet another Kickstarter-spawned entry into the ever-growing field of Rogue-Likes, but with a refreshing new twist. This time around, the player takes on the role of a small party of 19th-Century explorers engaged in a gentleman’s wager - to travel the world on six concurrent expeditions, competing to see who can gain the most fame. It’s a fairly quick and lethal game, but that’s exactly what it’s meant to be - a good way to kill a few hours at a time, running expedition after expedition off to their doom.
– Real player with 150.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hex Grid Pixel Graphics Games.
The Short Pitch
TCE is one of the best games in its class, a Roguelike-inspired strategy/adventure game that will leave you wanting more. Easy enough to beat several times in one day if you’re dedicated, yet hard enough to make every victory feel like you clawed your way to it from the depths of hades.
If you’re looking at this game and you’re even half sure you want it, get it. If looking at it fills with you a warm and gooey sense of longing for the hours spent huddled around CRT monitors taking turns playing The Oregon Trail, buy it. Even if you’re a more modern gamer, but you’re a fan of FTL, Caves of Qud, the Binding of Isaac, or similar, buy it.
– Real player with 82.6 hrs in game
It Stares Back
First I just want to get it out of the way that
! for no apparent reason at all the store page us calling it 4x which immediately shaves respect points for the dev doing that. It’s my one real criticism which is a minor thing except that words have meaning. You can’t just call things whatever you want. Then other idiots get misinformed until all Steam or GOG becomes a massive dumpster fire and people start not even realizing just how the fuck to make games anymore with enough misinformation. So, it’s a casual RTS, or RTS-lite. It has nothing whatsoever to do with 4x in the slightest and it bothers me maybe even less than confuses me how the hell a game dev could make that much of a mistake without doing it on purpose
– Real player with 40.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hex Grid Action Games.
Was introduced to It Stares Back through the Reddit post they made to advertise it, and instantly fell in love with the artstyle of this game, and was enamoured by the lore weaving together the world it’s based in. Cosmic horror, biopunk, and post apocalyptica seamlessly weave together to form the world of the Great Tapestry, a grotesquely beautiful hellscape beset by a ravenous, deafening, void. As the Noble Guide, you are tasked with ripping the souls of long dead soldiers from the earth to fight it back.
– Real player with 17.3 hrs in game
Wizards and Warlords
This is the good stuff. I have 13 hours played and I started playing it less than 36 hours ago. It gets the ‘one more turn’ feel just right, and has enough depth to keep things interesting, but is a bit un-optimized in terms of interface and mechanical transparency.
The Dev (yeah, the one dude making it on his own) is basically the paragon that all early access devs should try to be, constantly pushing updates and tweaks and engaging the community in respectful and productive discourse with humility and ingenuity. His turnaround time on new ideas is alarmingly fast, which is why there are multiple patches every week.
– Real player with 228.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hex Grid Turn-Based Games.
I very much wanted to this game to be great. The references to Dominion but with a different take on it.
There’s so much in the game, cool thought out magic, cool proc gen world, cool city development, cool leader development. But it’s so shallow. I didn’t care about any of my leaders, all the cities were functionally the same.
And the list of resources is insane. There’s a ton of resources to be gathering, but most have only a single use. It’s annoying to play a Fae wizard, get herbs and fairy dust, and have little use for it. You chase more resources until you realize you have no use for mithril. I’d rather have a smaller more concentrated list of resources that did something.
– Real player with 104.0 hrs in game