I bought Arcanum way back when it was first released - I'd heard a great deal about the Fallout games but never got the chance to play them as I was too young to really be into gaming when they came out, and by the time I was interested, they were too difficult to find. Having heard that Troika was made up of a lot of the key people behind that series, I knew I wanted to check out Arcanum, and the relationship with the Fallout series becomes very clear from very early on in the game. Aside from the mechanical similarities in the way turn-based combat works, the game clearly takes inspiration from Fallout's open nature, and cranks it up as high as it will go. There's remarkable freedom in the character creator, and it's often surprising how many different ways there are to complete a given task with different types of characters. That's not to say that every build of character will be POWERFUL, but so long as you put a little bit of thought into what kind of character you make, it's easy for your character to be viable. A real strong point of the game for me is the dialogue. I've played this game more times than I can remember, and each time I try a different kind of character, I'm still surprised by new dialogue options that didn't show up before. Every aspect of the game seems to be based around "freedom" - a lot of games make the claim that "You can play whoever you want!", but usually when you go through a second time with a different character, you notice that you get more or less the same dialogue options with maybe one or two unique cases where there's a difference. Arcanum, on the other hand - well, to give you an idea, if you play a character with intelligence lower than 9, the entire game will be a significantly different experience for you. Other options might not be quite as... noticeable as that case, but playing through as a half-orc gets you many different reactions from NPCs than playing as an elf. The game isn't perfect - combat is kind of a weak point, though you can actually avoid combat in a lot of cases. There are a few mandatory dungeon crawls, however, the first of which tends to be a major stopping point for a lot of people trying the game. My advice here is just fight past it - it's not as long as it feels and the game gets good again afterwards. Likewise, as I mentioned earlier while every character build can be viable, that doesn't make them even. There are quite a few magic and tech choices that are significantly better options than others, sometimes so much so that choosing them can feel like it ruins the game when you play a character that doesn't have them. Still, overall this is the ideal game for someone who really likes to play their character they want to play it - even the fallout games don't reward individuality as much as this game, and I'd say this is a must-have for any fan of detailed RPGs.
