Renowned Explorers: International Society

I bought this after seeing all the good reviews, and it was 50% off. This is the most "manufactured" game I've played. It feels like a bunch of strangers were sat in separate rooms for a few hours, and one was asked to come up with a generic rock-paper-scissors battle system using unassuming names like "attack type A/B/C", another with writing a world for a strategy game, another for writing an FTL-inspired progression system. Then those people met for 1 hour to pool their results (replacing names like "attack type A" with "Friendliness"), hired a cheap Flash graphic artist and bought generic music, and out came Renowned Explorers. Nothing fits together. Nothing is engaging. "Use the power of Bullying Speech to make your enemies lose HP! Oh no, they responded with Friendly Speech, and you lost 20% more HP, and lost Resolve! Shoulda punched them instead! You will never get the title of Great Explorer at the end of your game now!" It's pointless mechanics, in a bland setting, and I had no reason to go on. I've rarely felt a game feel so..."gamey". Spinning a wheel for a percentage chance to succeed at any action (which is what you'll do in 80% of the map areas you visit) is the definition of not having fun gameplay. After about 3 hours I just used CheatEngine to see the ending through and called it a day. Replay value and additional characters don't matter when the core gameplay is unappealing. Nothing in the artistic layers is redeeming either. The graphics are simple Flash vector graphics with no real detail. The music is generic filler, and you will forget the melodies 2 seconds after they stop (in fact, I doubt you will notice them while playing). I have to be a lot more discriminating with my purchases from now on. It's unfair to all the other devs that I paid 18$ for this one (and that's at 50% off!).

Not what I expected... Not so much an adventure game as a VERY simple tactical board game (think checkers but where each 'jump' can be given an emotional attitude. The best attitude to choose is based on the mood and mission goals, and is rarely in doubt... The whole thing comes across as aimed at LITTLE kids, intended to show you can resolve combat by making your opponents happy, etc... It's a weird thing. There's not much actual tactical decision making especially since the boards allow pretty free movement, so positioning isnt important. I know they were going for humor here but the whole thing is like trying to get adults to enjoy watching Dora the Explorer. The pace is slow and there are multiple mixed resources (that seem arbitrarily disctinguished) and it just all falls flat. No sense of real discovery, kid's cartoon sensibilities, overly simplified system with a veneer intended to make it seem more complicated, but that has very little ACTUAL effect... Just blah. I like the art and presentation.

Renowned Explorers was a difficult game for me to review, but one I felt I needed to do so. The mechanics of the game and other technical aspects seemed really solid to me. I also really like the uniqueness of it. It actually seemed like such a good fit for my needs at the time that I even bought all the extras. Soon after playing it I beat the campaign. It’s a very short game. I went to start another campaign and find out what I had unlocked, and saw that the characters on the team I played with could now be selected as captains. The captain of the team gives a small bonus to the team, and different captains give different ones. I looked to see what else I’d unlocked, and found the achievements page which reminded me of what I’d done in my play-through. Achievements don’t have any effect on the game, basically just a trophy case of stuff to look at. And that’s it, that’s what I’d gained. Essentially, this meant that it’s a quick game where characters have all progress reset to zero after their campaign is done and nothing is meant to be carried over from game to game. Not items, skills, attributes, levels, etc. The “nothing carried over between games” thing is something some rogue-lites tend to do, but this is a very short game where the player is restricted to choosing from preset characters. I mention this detail because I’m reminded of a rogue-like called “Caves of Qud” where things aren’t carried over between play-throughs or accessible between saves, and it utilizes permadeath when characters die. The difference is that Caves of Qud is a MASSIVE game with an extreme amount of content and game hours to be played. It also has you create extremely customized characters to play with an incredible level of depth and variations. The roguish aspects of the game don’t really feel like limitations, they feel more like “mortality”. A unique character with its own unique life and achievements and death. Renowned Explorers didn’t feel like that. I felt more like I’d just eaten a lite snack that promptly deleted itself from my stomach, leaving me hungry again and presenting me with a small menu of other snacks that promised to do the same. I’m not sure, maybe Renowned Explorers is meant to be a “casual rogue-lite”. I think I’ve also heard comparisons to FTL, but somehow the zero progress resets after beating FTL campaigns didn’t really feel as unsatisfying to me as it did in this game. I’ve actually clocked quite a few hours into FTL. A lot of people seem more than okay with these aspects of the game which is perfectly fine and understandable, and as I said the game does have some good things going for it aside from my issues with it. That’s why I’m giving it 4 stars, rather than an accurate representation of my actual enjoyment of it now, because it’s a good game in quite a few notable ways, just not for me as it is.

You'll have a lot of fun with this the first couple of times through the adventure. It's fun that you can choose different ways to handle the encounters, and how you handle the encounter affects what you get out of it. But whatever route you choose, the encounters play out in the same turn based combat (you have to use your imagination to know that sometimes this combat is representative of a conversation), and there is a lot of it, and although it is unique combat among games, it is highly repetitive with in this game. And so even though this is designed as a rogue-like, you won't feel the need to replay it once you've finished it once or twice and that can be accomplished in a couple of sittings. Maybe every indie game doesn't have to be a roguelike?

Really fun to go on adventure and look for treasures. I really enjoy the roleplay aspects of the game. Each run is quite short so casual, not too stressful in that way, but quite complex too with an interesting combat system and lot of intricacies if you are looking to score big. Art is beautiful and pretty much everything is polished. There is nothing in game to get frustrated or annoyed at, apart from the occasional unlucky rng wheel spin . Highly recommended. There is an expansion coming soon in the next few months, alpha testing has just started.