Abbey Games’ last title Reus was an interesting game that combined several genres with a great art aesthetic. This time they’re back with Renowned Explorers: International Society; that combines strategy and rogue-like design and could be their best game yet… if you don’t get lost along the way.
Going on an Adventure:
Previously with Reus, the game was set up around a basic challenge setup of how long you had to mess around on a planet completing objectives. Renowned Explorers: International Society goes into a bit more detail with a story of exploring the world for treasure. At the start of a campaign, you’ll create a three person expedition from a pool of characters. Your captain determines specific bonuses and you are limited by who can be captain depending on your current progress in the game.
Every character comes with different abilities, bonuses, starting equipment and in an interesting twist, how they perform best based on different emotional strategies which we’ll talk about in a minute.
The cast of characters and hand drawn look, give the game a lot of personality
From there, you’ll be taken to the first map with each area generated based on some set variables. Moving around, each point on the map will cost supplies that you bring a limited amount of on each trip; running out of supplies will weaken your party with every step taken.
Events on the map come in different types and will give you a variety of rewards and punishments based on how you deal with them. Your party member’s skills will give them a bonus chance to succeed if the challenge matches it, with some high ranking skills giving you special bonuses, and then it’s up to the adventure wheel to decide if you win or lose.
Out of all your resources, Resolve is the biggie. Every time a party member falls in combat or certain negative events, you will lose resolve; run out of resolve and the game is over. You can explore areas to find tokens that provide you with resources after the quest is over and there are events that you can choose who to interact with for a chance at great treasure.
The world map lets you pick your next quest, buy gear and helpers, and unlock research options
After an expedition, you can use your accumulated resources to upgrade your party, buy passive benefits, new gear and just generally make the group stronger.
The overall campaign is about doing five expeditions of your choosing before going on the final one, where it’s make it or break it time. The major goal is to earn over 2,000 points of renown; via questing and treasure hunting to beat your rival. Since you are exploring strange lands, there is always danger around every corner and Renowned Explorers: International Society features a robust combat system.
“I Second That Emotion:”
Combat takes place on a turn based map where your team of three will go first and then the enemy. What makes Renowned Explorers: International Society different from other strategy games on the market is reading the emotion of the battlefield. At the start of a match, you’ll be given an idea of the emotional level of the enemy; either Aggressive, Friendly or Devious. There is a rock- paper-scissors balance between the three: Aggressive beats Friendly, Friendly beats Devious, Devious beats Aggressive. Each member of your party has one or more attacks related to one of three emotional states and you can use this to twist the emotions of the match and the enemies to your advantage.
Making an enemy scared using a Devious attack for example, would lower their attack and if the state of the battlefield was aggressive, that would change to give you an advantage. Changing the emotional state of the battlefield gives certain attack or defensive bonuses and allows you to try and tilt the scales in your favor; all the while the enemy can change their emotional status. To the left of the emotional state, you’ll see what skills you can use to try and change the state to something else as the enemies will try the same thing.
Combat requires careful tactics that keep in mind the emotional state of the battle as well as your team and the enemy
Completing the battle under a specified emotional state will sometimes grant additional bonuses and possibly a buff for the reminder of the quest. Beyond that, each character’s attacks can also do unique effects, have different ranges and they will unlock new ones as they level up.
A basic strategy is to use attacks that can put your enemy in a weaken emotional state and buff your party members with good emotions. There is a lot here actually, and creating synergies between your party members is an involved affair.
The best thing about Renowned Explorers: International Society is the huge amount of mechanics and potential strategies you have available. Selecting your party members and how you choose to upgrade them will give you vastly different experiences; not to mention all the other ways of improving and using your resources.
The game’s hand drawn aesthetic makes everyone stick out and helps you to fall in love with your wacky crew; along with the game’s lighthearted story. The combat system is definitely unique and the game is bursting at the seams with mechanics and systems to dig into. However, where Reus faltered due to its mechanics not growing, Renowned Explorers: International Society almost buckles under the weight of all the elements that the player has to learn and keep track of.
Lost:
Renowned Explorers: International Society front loads a lot of its depth and complexity at the start; you have to decide a captain who will give you a bonus and then two different crew members. The game is nice enough to give you party suggestions, but doesn’t make any attempts to explain to you what a good party is. You’re going to be picking a party that defines your entire strategy for the rest of the game before you actually understand what’s going on; not a problem for expert players, but this can be troublesome for new ones starting out.
There is definitely a lack of information that pervades the game. For example, we talked about how different challenge events are tied to different skill levels, but there were plenty of times where the skill the game mentioned had no relation to the challenge itself. Continuing with that point, there didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason why my success rate was so high for one event of a type, and then so low for another event of the same type; even with the chance breakdown display.
The adventure wheel can lead to big rewards or big failure while exploring each area
One of the biggest tips I can give you about exploring, is you want to hit as many points during a quest for resources before going to the final event. Similar to FTL, the game gets progressively more challenging and you need to upgrade your characters in order to stand a chance.
Getting back to the lack of information, we turn to the combat system. Despite how original the system is, I found it at first glance to be a confusing mess of buffs, bars and lack of detail about what’s going on.
Enemies have emotional bars that drain or fill based on the type of attack like the player, but it took me awhile to understand what the bar’s position does to the enemy’s emotional level. I had plenty of questions about combat that there didn’t seem to be an easy answer to; such as, what did armor do, why attacks of the same emotional type did not get a bonus for attacking a weakness, what were strengths and weaknesses, what items to buy and a lot more.
I also found characters considered “glass cannons” to be very risky to the point of not being worth it, because of the huge movement ranges coupled with the wide environments and the inability of defensive characters to properly tank. This also has an effect of breaking the combat system a little bit. Most battles past the first stage are going to be with enemy parties equal to or greater than your own in terms of numbers; meaning a weak link either due to speech or armor defense can get focused down very easily; costing you precious resolve. Making things worse is the fact that boss fights tend to have the ability to infinitely spawn minions.
As a side note, this is why many turn based combat systems have some kind of mechanic for punishing characters from moving directly past a member of the opposite team; to limit their mobility and give range characters some means of defense while punishing those that get caught out in the open.
The problem with understanding the complexities of combat, is that too much of the relevant information is scattered around the UI and unless you are actually looking over every little detail, you’re not going to find the answers to your questions. Here’s a pro-tip regarding an earlier point; the enemy’s portrait when you click on them actually shows you what emotional attacks they’re weak against and that was something that I accidentally stumbled on.
There are a lot of interconnecting game systems present, and it can make things a bit difficult to learn
Another point that may be frustrating to players is how the rogue-like elements interact with the strategy. Unlucky events can do a number on your team’s resources and stats while exploring.
I had a perfect run go sour because I had nothing but bad luck with events that just devastated my stats, resolve and supplies before the final event on the map.
To make things worse, you cannot retreat from a bad situation; unlike in The Curious Expedition where the option to return to home base or run from a fight was available.
This is really troubling as certain encounters will punish certain emotions; if you don’t know ahead of time or pick the wrong encounter, expect to be at a huge disadvantage or outright lose.
This makes Renowned Explorers: International Society similar to Dungeon of the Endless, where the player’s success can be out of their hands sometimes and is more about the luck of the level. Have an unlucky time, and the difficulty spike at the latter half of the game (and the second one at the final mission) will probably be your demise. One point to mention, you can play the game on exploration mode, where there is no permadeath and the developers are thinking about putting in difficulty settings.
Treasure:
Despite my complaints, Renowned Explorers: International Society is an excellent step forward for Abbey Games. The design is an amazing foundation that gives them a lot of leeway in growing the game. They have already announced plans to continue adding expeditions and content which will only make things better. If you can learn its intricacies, there’s a lot here for both rogue-like and SRPG fans to dig into. For more Renowned Explorers: International Society, you can watch my spotlight video with several more up on the Game-Wisdom YouTube Channel.
