While some of my all-time favorite games are indie RPGs that emulate the classics, my ears perk up most when developers instead exercise their creative freedom to explore new ideas. Arco fits this criterion perfectly. It’s the prime example of the fresh perspective that small teams outside the RPG development bubble can bring to a too-often stubborn genre.
Arco is uniquely set in a pseudo-fictional Mesoamerica around the early 16th century when Spanish conquests colonized the land. This tale follows three different revenge stories exploring how the dual threat of foreign invasion and warring indigenous tribes led to the latter’s downfall. It’s definitely no history lesson, as the tribes are all made up, the Spanish settlers are never named by nationality, and many fantastical elements are at play (this is an RPG, after all). However, it paints a grim picture of the suffering of occupied peoples nonetheless, a perspective that is sadly more relevant than ever.
Each chapter is a vignette with its own cast of characters and tale to tell. They follow pretty consistent formats: lead your characters through a series of static screens strung together by a map that implies long treks. These stories intersect in ways that become relevant as the big picture unveils itself, eventually intersecting for a final act that gave me strong Live A Live finale vibes. While I noted the game gets grim—and oh boy, it does—it’s made more impactful by the moments of levity and constant banter between party members, townsfolk, and other frontier inhabitants.
I did take issue with Arco’s choice to use internet lingo and emoji faces in dialogue. While I understand the need to express emotions beyond what the art style is capable of, this aspect felt amateurish and pulled me out of the experience every time. It happened often enough (especially as you progress into later chapters) that it became a particularly sore spot and negatively affected how I felt about the characters.
Along those same lines, Arco does not handle its ending well. I won’t go into spoilers, but the game’s actual final boss is locked behind what ostensibly seems like the “bad” ending (the one received for increasing your guilt by choosing misdeeds over friendlier options at certain junctures). The non-guilty ending feels rushed by comparison, with no real challenge to cap off an otherwise difficult game. It also prioritized providing closure to a single cast member over others. This said, while I have my criticisms, the journey is still an enthralling one that makes these flaws easy enough to overlook given its careful and impactful approach to touchy, topical subject matter.
When I say the game is challenging, combat springs to mind. It’s a unique mix of turn-based and real-time combat that plays like a top-down variation on Valkyria Chronicles’ formula in many ways. The game swaps between a tactical phase where time stops to let you set up your party’s next moves and an action phase where it all chaotically plays out until pausing again. You need to play around the attacks and movement of enemies, as one misstep could find a character blasted away in a swarm of bullets near the end of a long fight. However, it never feels unfair because you get all the information regarding enemies’ future moves during the tactical phase. In other words, you aren’t stronger than your enemies, but you have the advantage of knowledge, which you utilize to outplay them. This makes winning all the more satisfying and losing a low-stakes learning experience due to a lack of penalty.
The developers keep players on their toes through the guilt system. I noted earlier the impact that choices have on the story, but they also can wildly change combat. Some encounters may not happen or may be significantly easier or harder depending on the dialogue you choose preceding them. While there’s no indicator of the consequences before making a choice, you can always back out if a battle is too hard and try another path to see if it potentially leads to a more manageable fight.
Your guilt level also impacts whether ghosts show up. These come in two primary forms: unkillable white ghosts that move toward your characters during the tactical phase and do damage on impact (or disappear after a handful of turns taken), and black ghosts that constantly move toward you but can be killed like a standard enemy. I’d equate this to an ATB system wherein you’re forced to make choices on your feet.
That said, the ghosts massively increase the difficulty at high guilt levels. Players who don’t want to deal with them have the option to turn them off altogether. Similarly, you can give yourself infinite throwable dynamite or turn off combat altogether. I’ll always commend developers for providing options that make their games accessible to everyone, though I also wouldn’t recommend this particular game without partaking in combat. Overcoming its challenge is a core part of what makes Arco‘s story beats work.
The RPG elements you expect are all here. You can equip items before entering battle, allowing you to regain health and action points, increase damage output, add special properties to your attacks, or provide single-use weapons. Along these same lines, skill trees let you customize what attacks your characters have access to, and you can freely swap between them whenever you’re not in battle. Which abilities and items you choose to bring and how you utilize them can turn the tables in a fight; there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, but the systems are easy enough to understand that it never feels burdensome to tweak your builds.
Well, at least on a mechanical level, it’s simple to customize. The interface for customizing characters is another story. It’s cumbersome to equip and unequip every ability and item, with each requiring you to select an item and press a different key. Why this currently PC-only game doesn’t have a drag-and-drop interface is slightly baffling, especially since it looks visually built for exactly that. A casualty of this clunky menu system is that organizing your ability bar is completely impractical, meaning there’s no good way to pair similar abilities on a numpad. If there’s one fix the developers should make to Arco, it’s how they handle their inventory and skill interfaces.
One area in which Arco lacks the quality of life it deserves is in dialogue—which doesn’t let you scroll through conversations—and poor pathfinding when traversing the environment. This occasionally leads to characters getting stuck on terrain before reaching the destination you clicked on. You can manually move them with the mouse as if it’s an analog stick, but improved pathfinding would’ve made for a much better experience. Oh, and let us pause during combat because it’s a standard option in virtually any game and only creates unnecessary friction when you can’t take a break for fear of ghosts.
Arco is visually stunning, especially with its expansive parallax-scrolling landscapes that sell the vastness of the Mesoamerican frontier despite the truncated screens your characters ride through. There’s a surprising variety of biomes to explore; this is not just rocks and desert, even if it seems so in the opening few hours. Battles are also incredibly easy to parse despite just how much information may be on screen at any time. The character art was underwhelming; I felt more could’ve been done to make our party members distinct from the enemies they were up against, though perhaps that was the point.
The soundtrack seals the deal on Arco’s authenticity. There are a handful of melancholic Spanish-sung vocal tracks perfectly placed throughout the game, played alongside geographically appropriate guitar parts. The developers knew the most emotionally impactful moments of their story and drove them home every time with a vocal track of this ilk. Beyond that, the composer dipped his toes into a variety of genres, including some wild rockers that play during battles. Some of the boss or major battle themes here simply kick butt but never feel out of place despite their markedly different soundscapes. Arco wouldn’t have worked as well as it does without this soundtrack that itself seems like it shouldn’t work on paper.
To top this all off, Arco doesn’t overstay its welcome. I’d wager the average player will get 10-12 hours out of it, give or take a few, depending on your combat proficiency and how much exploring you do. There’s no filler here; these are all quality hours spent. The developers could’ve easily padded out the runtime but chose not to, which is something many of even the most revered RPGs we’ve reviewed recently could learn from.
If you’re a fan of SRPGs and Arco flew under your radar, you owe it to yourself to correct that. It’s one of the better games I’ve played in that category in recent years, with a combat system that successfully tries something new, a setting that hasn’t been explored in any RPG I’m aware of, and a journey that leaves an impact in no small part thanks to the developers’ handling of its subject matter. There are some flaws here that the developers could fix to make this game even better, but don’t let those dissuade you from trying out this singular RPG experience.
