Renowned Explorers International Society

Renowned Explorers International Society. This one is rogue lite/choices matter type of game with turn based tactical rpg battle system. I’ve played a lot of them with all kind of gameplay and features, this game fits the bill too. There are pluses and minuses, good and bad so let’s take a look at it.

First of all what is this game about? This game is about fame, you want to gather a crew of explorers, scientists and archeologists. With this team you explore the famous places on our planet and look for priceless artifacts to take for the London museum. Ah those brits, don’t feed them bread just let them yoink something with religious/historical/sentimental value from the end of the world to their museum to display it for everyone. But there is a catch, we need to make to the top 10 renowned explorers and most important we need to “outrenown” our archrival Rivaleux. Well obviously I failed to do everything on me first run but I managed to get to the 4th place. So I need to grow and level up more if I ever want to win big. 

Okay let’s move to the gameplay section. How it all goes. Well we pick our captain and two comrades. At first list of available characters is small so we only pick three characters to pick. But after four successful expeditions the list of available characters will increase. Good, what next? Did you look at the characters attributes? They divide into three categories: blue scientists, red… erm fighters I guess and green sneaky thieving rogues. Each character starts with 3 attacks available. Physical, friendly type interaction and devious type interaction attack. Depend on what we use the main theme of an encounter will change our basic stats. For example if it’s straight up blood for blood then everyone will have their physical defense increased and “interaction defense lowered”. You can mix theme by switching your type of attacks. The upper center plaque will inform you what type of attack you used and what bonuses and debuffs it provides. 

Since it is “international” society I immediately looked for a homey. And yes, one Russian scientist girl available from the start who’s terrible with friendly interactions but good with threatening and frying your arse with her electrical weapon. So I went through couple of places, Ireland, Memphis, Highlands and Mali. Ok we picked our team and we picked a place to explore. We are finally here what now? Now we see choices in which direction to travel in our main target. Whenever we travel to another point on the map we will use food. We don’t have too many supplies at the start, so we would need to find a way to increase our maximum capacity, but that’s for later. For now we must remember to occasionally pick points with bread icon on them for a chance to resupply our provisions. Apart from bread icon there are others, they mostly tell us what kind of check we would need to use on it or if there is a treasure or an encounter. Most of the icons are color coded but sometimes we would see icons that would require a certain perk instead of general attribute. We can get those perk via trinkets’ level ups and sometimes treasures. So since we need to boost our character card/rank/fame we must how younglings say it “minmax”. That means spent as fewer resources as possible and gather as much as we can. As you can get we have to explore as far as our food supplies or resolve allows us. Yeah right, resolve. I forgot about it. Resolve is your revive points, without them it’s game over. Whenever you are beaten or your spirit is broken you lose one resolve point. You start with five resolve points and get two more points for successful exploration. Of course you can also find them while exploring. 

A little bit more about resolve in battle. You can revive your comrade in battle, but so far apart from “spirit points” I did not find ways to heal in battle. So you can guess that you will be outnumbered and overwhelmed very soon on your quest. It is especially obvious whenever there is an “epic encounter”.  In this encounter you will face a very tough enemy with around 10 to 15 times max amount of SP (spirit points this game equivalent of HP) that you have and the enemy will also have an infinite amount of reinforcements. I advise you to avoid those epic encounters till you figure the game out better. 

Of course there is also "rest" time. When you are done exploring, you can spent everything that you looted to improve your position in the R.E.I.S. First thing is you need to review your expedition and set your research papers in the one of science institutions. It will either unlock a shop or green "passive bonus" friends. You can spend blue science points on the research papers that'll give you small benefits. You can spent your red insight points to do boring routine job for some extra  red, blue and green points as well as gold. You can also spend your green friendly points to buy "passive bonus" comrades and perk teachers. They are upgradeable by YOUR green points. Finally you can spend your hard earned money for better equipment, there are several shops that are needed to be upgraded by YOUR money.

That’s about it for now. I quite liked this game but not without minuses. Those minuses are my bane of existence, you can easily guess it. Yes it is hit percentage. Lady Luck be buggered. Weird thing is lowest hit percentage I saw was 80% yet I still managed to miss several times, tell me it’s not BS. I want my hit percentage to be mathematical and by this I mean with accuracy of 90% I’ll tolerate only one miss out of ten attacks. With all that I want to say do not skip on this game it is good. Thanks for reading and good day.