Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

It is possible to play this game as a "special needs" ogre... and the dialog changes accordingly! How cool is that? Fun crafting, magic is a bit overpowered but play technology for added challenge if you think it's too easy. Great settings and sandbox feel. Love the story, and lets you be as good or evil as you want. In fact, the characters you can have join you check your alignment first. I haven't played this in years because it's a royal pain in the a$$ to get running on Windows XP and higher. But GOG did it for me! Yay!

This is my Arcanum story. Back in the day, 2001 or 02, I played a demo of Troika's Arcanum. Two things came into my mind: a) for a 200X game the graphics were horribly outdated, even back then, b) my computer back then was barely able to run the game. I played the demo for some time, but then, after a few bugs and crashes, some produced by my low-end computer, some by the game itself, I lost interest in Arcanum. About half a year ago, I picked this game up from gog.com, but being swamped with a bunch of other games and a stressful time at work, I never got around to actually playing it. Checking out gog's holiday calender thingy, my interest in Arcanum was finally reinitiated, and now, more than nine years after its release, I used this very boring day to set the game up and, well, finally play it. What can I say? This is, despite of the awful graphics, one of the most complete and addictive RPGs I have ever played. I have played now for twelve hours straight and I am completely sucked in. For those of you hungry for a game world that is NOT world war 2, post-apocalypse, Afghanistan or... Farmville, this is the game for you. You will quickly look beyond its obvious shortcomings, be it the sub-par presentation or the clunky (but functional) interface. Arcanum shows how much more impact a game can have if most of it has to happen in your head, in your imagination. Arcanum does exactly that and it is still up there with some of greatest RPGs of the past few years, even if i looks and feels like something your grandma would have coded. Get all the neccessary patches and start your own adventure in Arcanum now, I guarantee, you won't regret it! Signed, an Arcanum newbie.

Arcanum prides itself on its size and a huge list of quests, but it suffers from a lack of content density, and some irritating design decisions. The story is good. It starts rather uninteresting, but after a while it becomes engaging. It's just a shame it takes so long to become so. The cities are horribly too big. Too much empty space, to many empty buildings and too much walking around. Because of the way its structured, you'll spend more time running around from person to person to identify this, sell that, fix that, that it becomes so impossibly boring. It also tends to shoehorn the player. You will not be able to find out the location of certain cities, EVEN if you talk to people about them, unless the main quests tells you to go to that city. Also, many quests are terribly unclear as to what to do next, so you'll be bumbling around a lot of the time. And theres surprisingly little choice in those quests. There were numerous moments where I felt my charismatic persuasion expert could smooth talk it...but there was never an option to do so. In comparison, in Fallout 2 I could always persuade people in these types of situations. It just seems that because of the game's hugeness, the quests are more generic and linear. I quit in the third part of the game. Yet ANOTHER quest that makes me do ANOTHER three quests that EACH make me do another quest in order to solve them. A good game that never really 'clicks', and has some bad design decisions.

If you can get over the really, really bad bugs in this game then it is actually fun. The story is interesting and the character development is fun. But the bugs are overwhelming, even with the latest unofficial patches this game is loaded with some game destroying bugs. In my playthrough I found 3 master trainer quests that I couldn't complete because of bugs. I also found that I could only play for about 20 mins at a time before I had to restart the game because it kept getting slower and slower until even attacking during combat took 10 seconds. Magical effects made it even worse. The game also suffers from some questionable game design. Traveling anywhere takes way too long. Your equipment takes damage over time (which isn't that bad) but early on you meet monsters that dmg both your weapons and armor when you hit them or they hit you. This results in having to either take off armor and punch enemies or carrying an extra set of each through the entire game. I also found some of the mechanics to be poorly documented. For example I never used anything other than magic weapons (swords, axes) and yet by the end of the game I somehow was 50% tech oriented. I never even used a gun... If you can get around the bugs this is a pretty interesting RPG.

Because I'm a huge fan of the original Fallout (played through them 10x), I really wanted to like this game. I mean, Fallout-like + steam punk... how can this be wrong? Still could not bring myself to like it. The pacing is really slow, there is no "hook" that makes me want to continue playing. The environments are boring and it doesn't "feel" steam punk Victorian so much. In Fallouts, you had constant reminders you were in a post-apocalyptic setup, but not as much here. The fights are also either really hard or really easy. It did not feel rewarding to complete quests. After ~12hrs of play, I got so bored I stopped playing for a few weeks. Then tried again for a few hours, and still got bored. Then I cheated to make my avatar feel cooler, but that excitement didn't last either. So I tried... but didn't like it. Anyway, for the price it is retailed at GOG, I would give it a shoot anyway (who knows, maybe you'll like it), but don't get your hopes up. This machine isn't as well oiled as Fallout 1&2.