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