Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

An RPG with a refreshingly unique setting and engaging cast, but flat narrative, some faulty game design decisions and cut corners. Atmosphere - The world of Arcanum is fascinating and unique for its time. The marriage of high fantasy DnD with Industrial era steam tech and culture create a setting unlike any other populated with interesting places, peoples and ideas. Unfortunately, the ambient audio does little to enhance the wonder of this world, as its composed entirely of string violins and doesn't vary up enough between locations to give any place much of an identity. Story/Narrative - The central mystery of the game unfolds at an uneven pace due to the overall lack of guidance and direction. There are plenty of side quests to engage your attention, but none of them have the gravity to leave you thinking about them after they're done. Thankfully, your supporting NPCs do possess a good deal of personality, with their own personal stories and dilemmas helping to salve the wounds left by the lackluster main mission. Your character can also come with a customized background, but as far as I can tell, it's never referenced beyond the stats it provides you. Gameplay - The relationship between magic and technology, along with the numerous races available, allow players to play around with different and highly varied character concepts. Combat is challenging, but never ridiculously so. The live action combat just doesn't work, but thankfully you can switch to a far more functional turn based system. Certain skills, spells and techs are simply better than others, but how much you want to exploit the game is largely up to you. Recommend To: Baldur's Gate/Fallout fans looking for something different. Alternatively Suggest: Planescape Torment/Baldur's Gate (Better narrative and characters, but less engaging gameplay). Fallout 1&2 (Better atmosphere and writing and highly customizible).

Everything about this game is great except the combat and the dungeons which are both atrocious. The rest of it is good enough to warrant a five star rating from me. The world building and the character development are still unparalleled to this day. You can even play a character that is zero percent combat focused. A common complaint I've read is exp is based on landing hits, this isn't entirely true, you do gain exp when your companion vanquishes an enemy as well as by completing quests, and seeing as you will reach max level well before the end of the game it doesn't matter.

From the team that brought you the original Fallout series (1+2) Arcanum delivers more than you could ever expect and more than you'd ever see in an A-list title today. While the isometric style or serious RPG mechanics may not be a strong fit for casual gamers, even the uninitiated will quickly find themselves wrapped up in the plot and finding ways to streamline their character builds to accomplish the many, many goals and objectives set forth in the game the vast majority of which are optional, allowing you to play the game however you intend. Arcanum is a world of many dichotomies magic and technology, good and evil, old and new, etc. and the path you take as a player is always up to you, the freedom of choice is one of the many merits of this game as you are never forced to fit into the world rather you let your choices and actions determine not only the fate of the world around you but how your character fits in to it. Featuring an enchanting soundtrack and many voiced characters, unforgettable and realistic NPC's and locations, literal hours of quests, humor, intrigue, romance, a complex and immersive crafting system, realtime and pausible or tactical turn-based combat to suit your playstyle or to be changed as necessary, a massive amount of magical spells to learn, an enormous world map with equally large locales therein, incredibly well written dialogue and overall story and a plethora of other reasons why Arcanum will quickly find its way into your top ten games of all time. I first played this game when I was about 12 years old and it has aged far better than any game I have ever played. I HIGHLY recommend patching the game before playing with the official patches and there is still an immense amount of player built resources online for modding the game however you see fit, the game itself also includes an editor for modding or creating your own playable maps. (The editor is fairly hard to use and may be unfinished).

- Sadly the fixed and low resolution didn't age well, there's a mod helping a bit by basically upscaling it. - The control scheme is mediocre. - Playing a female MC comes at a disadvantage which can be mitigated but then you lose out on backgrounds, only male MCs do not have any reduced max attributes and can choose between backgrounds. +/- Many lengthy dialogues paired with the information you get to not being neatly compressed and accessible presented to the player for later reminding oneself (though you basically get all the info in your ingame journal that journal is badly organized). You might want to keep a doc or something outside of the game. +/- The MC can be developed freely not bound by classes, but that freedom comes at a cost and results in several possibilities for soft locks, where earlier decisions are creating problems with progressing the story. Raising the level cap does help with that (there are mods for that), though if you run too deep into one of those dead ends you'd have to grind quite a bit to get the game flow running again. + interesting mechanics around the main conflict around magic and traditions against technology and progression. + there are few decisions between clearly morally good or bad choices, but often decisions will matter later. SPOILERS AHEAD The game starts with explaining how magic and technology are mutually exclusive. Hence there are 3 major routes of developing the MC: going more or less all out magic or tech OR trying to balance both ways. There are things you'll need for the story that are either magic or tech, in my opinion it's basically impossible to go totally exclusive either way, especially as the npcs are mostly useless, and at least some even become adversaries (or can become it). Often you'll have to compromise to further the story, sometimes that'll lead to problems, many decisions aren't good nor bad but rather somewhere in between.

One of my favorite CRPGs of all time. It can be on the difficult side, but the replayability is high with the varying builds you can make and NPCs you can ally with. Definitely look for the fan patches to bring it up to date, but I had no trouble on Windows 10 with vanilla.