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.
