YMMV / Renowned Explorers

• Difficulty Spike: The first expedition — whichever map you get — is pretty benign. All of the fights are easy if you're paying attention, and challenges with harsh penalties for failure are rare. After that, the game stops pulling its punches.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The game features Charles Darwin as a villain. One year later Curious Expedition was released, another roguelike with a similar premise... featuring Darwin as a player character.
• Spiritual Adaptation: A group of charismatic adventurers exploring exotic locations all around the world (including Peru and Egypt), fights without blood, and ruse-diplomacy being useful to defuse some issues... It's an adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin (1991), right?
• Surprise Difficulty: On the surface, this is a light-hearted and colourful game without blood or death, in which you control a team of 19th century's adventurers exploring The Theme Park Version of various exotic locations. Under this cartoonish veneer, this is a real strategy game with sometimes unintuitive mechanics, a steep learning curve, and a part of random in its difficulty (this is classified as a roguelike...).