The roguelike expedition simulation Curious Expedition has been released:

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After over 15 months and 20 major feature updates it's finally time to leave Early Access! Since our first day on Steam you've welcomed us amazingly. Your wishes and invaluable feedback have let us craft a game that we're truly proud of and more importantly that would have never been possible without your guidance. Thank you so much!

We will slow down the update loops compared to the Early Access phase, but don't worry: we still have lots of ideas for this game and can't wait to show them to you. Top priority items right now on our todo list are translations, modding and achievements.

But for now enjoy the game and tell your friends if you like it! That would help us out tremendously. Adventure awaits!

The Alpha 28 "A Wonderful World" version has been released:

Alpha 28 (May 11th, 2016) "A Wonderful World"

For this release we're mostly focussing on replacing the remaining art placeholders. Thank you for all your support! Enjoy Alpha 28!

• New Art
• New stone forest art
• New desert art
• New desert cactus art
• New desert pyramid art
• New scorched earth art
• New cave hole art
• New cave mummy art
• New cave corpses art
• New cave paintings art
• New tomb art
• New stone statues art
• New portraits for hyena and raptor
• Tuning
• Tweaked starting trek setup for Kingsley and Huizinga
• Restricted pacifists from using more weapon dice
• Bugfixes
• Fixed pyramid staying buried (thanks to Charles Watkins for the help)
• Fixed flickering character info box for mounted characters. Also rider and mount have separate hit boxes for their individual character info boxes now.
• Fixed shields in combat being covered by large inventory
• Fixed treasure map being covered by large inventory
• Fixed info box for character unlocks and site unlocks not appearing
• Fixed overlong text in harbor
• Moon stones were not correctly removed from inventory after entering pyramid
• Increased performance
• Fixed various typos

The devs are planning a late summer full release.

Some new updates for The Curious Expedition became available this week.

First there is the bugfixing update:

We've released a new update that fixes some more issues! Thanks so much for all your support and for your feedback. As we're coming closer to the 1.0 release of the game, we'll put a bigger focus on making sure that it is as bug free as possible.

Alpha 20.2 (Nov 17th, 2015)

• Fixed sometimes stuck in loading before Expedition-6
• Fixed recruiting Scottish soldier in harbor
• Fixed endless tortoise spawning
• Fixed multiple Sterling appearing at harbor
• Fixed missing icons for some perks
• Fixed occult vision perk not working correctly

Secondly there is this update about friendship and and overview of the various updates.

And there is some gameplay footage:

Thanks Eye.

The Early Access game Curious Expedition got an Halloween update:

Update 20 "Halloween Special"

Halloween is coming! We've finally added a character that we've been looking forward to for quite some time. And time it was. Have fun leading expeditions into the unknown being lead by the masterfull describer of the unknown himself. We've also added lots of other new contents and events.

Here are some highlights..

New Explorer: H.P. Lovecraft

• Lovecraft is unlocked by default for this version.
• Has necronomicon as starting equipment
• His perk "Cosmic Indefferentism" gives him custom events when using the necronomicon
• Has reduced maximum sanity

New Location: Altar

• You can sacrifice items on the altar
• We don't want to spoil exactly what this influences in the game

Content

• Added new mummy enemy/event
• Added giant spider enemy/event
• Added new tome page for waterfall creation
• Added new tome page healing springs creation
• Added some new night camp event
• Added new loot item: spider leg
• Added new item: pumpkin lantern

Tuning

• Reduced gain for British soldier from perk
• Weapon dice are now associated with different dice colors
• Actions in warp worlds don't result in standing changes anymore
• Animal trophies can be sold for funds or given away for fame again, although at a lower value than before

Etc

• Updated abomination/canibal status description to better reflect what they do
• Added missing status icons

Bugfixes

• Fixed entering golden pyramids with moonstones sometimes didn't work
• Unlocked destinations should be shown in gold color again
• Animals don't generate post-game narration anymore
• Sprite crate glitch on water buffalos
• Wrong background image when recruiting characters in river villages
• Stone circle behaving weird with superstitious characters
• Fixed world creation tome

There's a lot of back and for around here about what exactly constitutes an RPG. Upcoming roguelike The Curious Expedition -- which is exploration-based and as far as I can tell completely combat-free -- may push that boundary, but to me the player-directed story makes it qualify. Plus, wandering around on an 8-bit-looking world map. The feels. 

My first few moments with The Curious Expedition were almost misleadingly delightful. Set in the 19th century, I was told to pick from a selection of charming pixel renderings of historical figures [you can play as Madame Curie] and dropped into the world, with the only stated goal of exploring the strange new randomly generated land I had found myself in. It was welcoming, colourful, and hiding a whole host of things that wanted to kill me.

The Curious Expedition is all about exploring a randomly generated set of hex tiles, finding villages, caves, people and roaming animals to interact with... This person wants payment if you’re going to stay the night, but do you want to stay in the cave full of human remains? Is it safe to eat these strange fruits?

When an expedition begins, you’ll know the location of a single native village and the area immediately around your party. The needle of your compass is swinging wildly, indicating that you have no idea which way to go ... Every new tile that you uncover adds to you knowledge of the region and the more you learn, the more accurate your compass becomes.

The game just entered alpha -- privately the through its German developer, not on Steam for once -- so you can see if it falls off the edge of your own private map of the genre.