Curious Expedition 2 ends its early access journey this month

Start packing your bag (checklist: hiking boots, boiled sweets, dinosaur saddle, etc) for adventure, because Curious Expedition 2 has announced a launch date of January 28th. The roguelikelike sends us on procedurally-generated 19th century adventures with a party from around the word, getting into all sorts of fantastical scrapes. We'll explore a hexy map, meet and befriend people, fight everything from spiders to sandworms in turn-based battles, trade, quest, and nab treasures. The first game was a good'un, so fingers crossed.

Adam Smith found a lot to like to like about the original in his Curious Expedition review, and we ended up calling the original one of our favourite games of 2016. Maschinen-Mensch launched the sequel into early access in June 2020, though young Matt Cox wasn't as taken with it.

"Playing the latest early access build has left me thoroughly de-psyched, because the new events are thin and far between and the combat I liked has been dumbed down," Matt said of CE2 in June. "It's a curious step back."

The game has seen a number of large content updates and patches since then, mind. We'll see its final form soon enough. Well, near-final form. Maschinen-Mensch say, "version 1.0 won't be the 'final' version of the game: we're already working on content updates to be released in the upcoming months!"

Curious Expedition 2 hits Steam on the 28th of January. It's due to venture onto Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch later this year.