Renowned Explorers International

It's pure luck (or maybe karma) that I even looked at this game, but I'm really glad I bought it for more than one reason.

The day it came out, Tess had just that morning asked me what I had been playing, and I answered "Path of Exile". Her response was "Don't you ever play things with non-depressing titles?". If that conversation hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't have looked very deeply at the news of the release on Steam, and I might have missed a game that is both fun and innovative.

Before I get into the ways in which the actual game design is innovative, I should mention two things.

First, it's a really fun little game. I don't expect to be playing it fanatically, but it doesn't require a huge time commitment yet has some strategic depth and fun storytelling. I'll likely have it installed for a long time, playing it in short spurts when I haven't the time for a deeper game or am just taking a break.

Second, much has been written about the way in which the encounter system treats physical attacks, bullying speech, and friendly speech all as ways of getting your opponents to let you do what you want; additional mechanics around the mood of the encounter and each participant add to this theme.

But despite the philosophically interesting flavor of this, the actual underlying mechanics in this area are far from new. Each character's available attacks are categorized into one of the three bins, assigned a mood effect from the subset appropriate to that bin, and a global rock-scissors-paper superiority mechanic based on the recent attacks used by both sides makes changing bins in mid-encounter with the right timing extra effective.

But what is really interesting to me about the game design here is the fresh take on some of the common elements of the recently-trendy "roguelike" genre. In most of these games that feature highly random procedurally generated maps, battles, and character upgrades, the randomness is king. Every playthrough is very different, but at least as much as in the ASCII classics the genre name evokes, player skill takes a huge backseat to luck.

Renowned Explorers does something really different here. While the rewards from the random adventures are randomized, they are expressed in terms of a set of currencies - call them research, fame, and money. The trees on which you spend these currencies are almost completely nonrandom, and they interact in different ways to directly buff your party members or your incomes.

The net result is a game that is both much more interesting and much less frustrating than most "roguelikes", because your success is dominated by your choices, rather than by random loot. "Encounters" (battles) are also fairly deterministic, though there is a small random component to damage. There is enough randomization that even if you make identical strategic choices you can get very different payoffs, but enough determinism that your choices really do matter.

It's a fine balancing act, and it's very well done. I'm particularly impressed that this level of innovation showed up in an indie "roguelike" game, of which it seems like there is at least one new one every week, many of which are best described as "like <x> but <y>" for some other roguelike "x".