I love treasure hunting. Wether I do it myself in RPGs when looting caves or watch people do it in movies like National Treasure — it doesn’t matter. It is blast imagining that there are unknown artifacts out there waiting to be discovered. So imagine my excitement when I realize that there is a PC game which revolves around the very concept of treasure hunting. Can Renowned Explorers: International Society satisfy one’s inner exploration cravings?
Renowned Explorers takes place during the 19th century, a time when legends could still be true and world exploration was at its peak. You are in charge of putting together a team of three explorers, all with different personalities, that will have to travel the world looking for treasure. The goal is to become the most renowned explorers and beat your archrival, Matthieu Rivaleux.
First you will have to choose your captain and two crew members. All characters have different perks, abilities, and personalities. Depending on who you pick as captain, you will also get a specific captain perk during your adventure. After selecting your dream team of explorers, you are thrown right into a starting location somewhere in the world that will act as your first exploration venture. My first task was finding a viking boat, which was fitting as I like viking culture.
Renowned Explorers is played much like a board game. You move your characters between nodes on a map, and experience random events that are all tailored to suit the location and culture you are exploring right at the moment. There are a lot of choices to be made during these events that can make or break you. This is where having three people in your group comes into play. Everyone has different stats and problem solving abilities depending on which perks they possess. For example: a survivalist has an increased chance of finding their way around terrain or harvesting supplies from certain locations, while an athlete can perform various feats of strength. It is very satisfying to learn about and use these abilities in the right way, as it increases chance for success while telling a fun story along the way.
There will be, more or less, battles that will have to be fought as well. This will put your crew on a map where you can move around in a turn based fashion. There are three ways to battle your opponents: you can either fight them, scare them away, or try to charm them into submission. It is a mechanic that is straight-up genius, as winning a fight with different tactics can yield different results such as changing the outcome of an event entirely. This also forces you to think before you act in most battles, since different enemies are weak to different tactics.
At the time of its release, Renowned Explorers was perceived by some as an impossibly difficult game. This has now led Abbey Games to patch more difficulty choices into it. There are two modes in the game: adventure mode and discovery mode. The latter lets you explore the game at your own leisure, with the ability to save and load the game whenever you please. If you loose in the adventure mode however, you need to start from the very beginning. Both modes let you pick between four different difficulties as well: easy, normal, classic, or impossible. Adventure mode, combined with the classic difficulty, is the mode I had the most fun with and really feels like this is what the game was made for. It does not take that long to play one session of Renowned Explorers, so it is not that much of a hassle to restart once you loose. All of the different crew combinations also gives it a lot of replay value as it changes how you approach the problems presented to you. It is always good to have choices, and after the patch the game allows players to play however they want.
The art style goes well with the rest of the overall theme, and it helps the humorous story by providing goofy and likable characters. It looks stylish and fits the 19th century setting quite well. The music helps in setting up the atmosphere of the game, but it is also the weakest part of the whole package. While the tracks themselves are well composed, they vary in sound quality with some tunes sounding worse than others. It reminds me of the days when some games used MIDI files, where the quality depended on your sound hardware. This does not take away to much from the game but it somewhat bothered me at times, since music is very important to me in video games.
Renowned Explorers is a fast paced game. A session consists of visiting 6 locales in the world to try and get enough renown to become number one. One of these sessions took me 2 -4 hours to complete. This is refreshing, as a lot of games these days take somewhere between 10 – 100 hours to finish, depending on the genre. This is a great reminder that games do not need to be hours upon hours long to have a great value.
I was surprised by how solid of a game Renowned Explorers: International Society really is. It feels like a board game made with the PC in mind. It is fast paced, customizable, and gives the player a lot of pure fun in the end. It hits all the right buttons in me with its humor, and it feels rewarding to play. I can see myself go back to it plenty of more times, especially when in need of a less time consuming game.
Now, if only there was a board game version of this as well. Then my treasure hunting dreams could be fulfilled completely.
A PC review code for Renowned Explorers: International Society was provided by Abbey Games for the purpose of this review