Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

This is a truly unique game with endless repeatability. A huge and detailed world, incredible atmosphere, endless and fun quests, tons of secret locations, dialogues, NPCs and so much beautiful artwork. Very diverse possibilities for character creation and development! The combat system has its flaws, but also gives a lot of opportunities to test unique play styles and determine which suits you the best. I have played this game for years now and still prefer it to many modern RPGs.

Arcanum is surely not the best game out there, but it's still enjoyable. Each quest has multiple solutions (usually divided into stealthy, diplomatic, dishonest or brute force) and most character skills will influence your gameplay. The game is poorly balanced, with certain skills towering above the others and some that are utterly useless. Go for a mage on your first playthrough and get Fireball ASAP. This will allow you to breeze through the battles as you explore the game and you learn the mechanics. Add thieving skills to earn yourself a five fingers discount in the shops and you're golden. What I found more fascinating is the history of the world around the character and the ambientation. The storyline is good and it will become more intriguing as you delve into it. This is the first game that made me seriously ponder upon the possibility of joining the BBEG; I mean, his reasons are quite sound, albeit extreme... At the current price is worth giving it a try. You're not going to love this game, nor hate it. It's just a decent game that could have been much more better.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was the first game from Troika Games, an outfit formed by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who all worked on Fallout 2 at Interplay. It's an isometric RPG set in a steampunk/fantasy world, and plays a lot like the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale 1 & 2), but with some significant differences. For example, it does not use the D&D ruleset, and the combination of magic and technology means there are interesting locations, items and different ways to solve quests.

I can't recommend this game enough but you really do need the unofficial patch. Go to Tim Cain's YouTube channel and thank him for existing.

Still a great game with immense amount of depth compared to majority of current rpgs. One thing you may want to do, is to improve the screen resolution via mods.