It's fun to feel you're a video games pioneer. The world sprawls out in front of you, in chunks of textured map-land, and you have to make often risky decisions about how to manage what lies before you. Will you spend time and precious energy stripping nearby plants for medicine, or will you make the long trek forward into the unknown, on the off chance you'll find water there?
Something about games makes the old-timey cocktail of pioneering exciting — remember playing Oregon Trail as a child, sorta-learning all about the journeys of early Americans while wagoners named after your classmates broke all their limbs and died of dysentery? Games are fun ecosystems to play relatively fearlessly with risk and possibility.
Berlin-based Maschinen-Mesnch's Curious Expedition, which I first saw in a Swiss games festival last year, is a fun and straightforward game of land expedition, where you manage your health and mental well-being as you wander maps in search of temples, villages and good trades (you're likely enjoy it if you enjoyed FTL). The cute thing about Curious Expedition is you can play as any number of great historical pioneers, from Charles Darwin to Ada Lovelace, each with their own special ability.
Pioneers, by Eigen Lenk, is another top-down game about forging out into the textured world and wrangling with the forces you find there, in a narrative wrapper that makes you feel like you're a kid again, peeping a musty copy of Swiss Family Robinson from your grandparents' garage cabinet. Its graphical palette is intentionally-dated, adding to the cozy-throwback feel.
Speaking of pioneering, though they've both been quietly underway for a few years now, neither of these games are finished yet. This means they can sometimes be a little unpredictable, as you see in the video at the top of this post. But they're worth a try. The new frontier of game creation and publishing lets players pay, sometimes optionally (Curious Expedition costs $12 for basic alpha access; Pioneers is pay-what-you-want with no minimum), to be part of an early project and watch it take shape. This lets developers offload some of the risk onto their biggest fans, and gives players a chance to be inside the creation process a little.
Experimenting with both games is a charming experience, both for their nostalgic feel and for the sense you're watching a new world sprawl out before you in more than one sense.
