Moving causes the bar to go down, with more difficult terrain – mountains, swamps and the like – costing more sanity.

The tension here is the Sanity bar, shown as a spiral in the top-right of the screen. They hide towns, resting places, significant events and – above all – the objectives for your expedition. If you’ve ever enjoyed the opening steps of a Civilization game, then you will know why this is so satisfying: enemies and their sphere of influence appear wandering allies do the same: and if you’re lucky, the hallowed question marks pop up, and it’s these that you should beeline to. As you step into the unknown, the map opens up and things begin to pop into existence. Move one hex at a time or be brave and span several at once. It is, in fact, remarkably simple, but so much can happen while you play it that you’d need several moleskine journals to record it all. It’s possible to describe Curious Expedition 2, but you’d need a fair few paragraphs, and it would come off as unfairly complicated. Stretch those Tintin comparisons to cover Around the World in Eighty Days, 2021’s Treasures of the Aegean, and Giraud’s Moebius comic books, and you have Curious Expeditions 2. You’re courted by various guilds and dynasties, as they finance you in the hopes that you will return with something world-changing.

You could imagine Captain Haddock screaming “blistering barnacles” as he’s chased by a mummy through one of Curious Expedition 2’s tombs.īeing set in end-of-the-19th-Century France helps the comparison too. And it’s absolutely the right choice for the game: this is, after all, a series of high-concept adventures into the unknown, taking in ghostly pirate ships, golden pyramids and tribes of lizardmen. Everyone looks drafted from a comic book serial, and it’s gorgeous. Where Curious Expedition 1 was a pixel-art, Curious Expeditions 2 owes a lot to Herge’s Tintin.

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