Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Of Arcanum and the Arcane!

There seems to exist within the audience that reads game reviews a fascile belief that reviewers must play through a game in it’s entirety to accurately assess a product. If you just play as much as you feel like, as much as you can bear, you’re not getting an authentic experience, after all. Suffering through that middle part of the game really helps you enjoy the amazing denouement which you’d otherwise miss. How shitty would Mirror’s Edge be, after all, without prolonged indoor battles where you have to run in circles to deceive and defeat enemies so you can reach its lackluster finish? Why would anyone feel anything for the final frames of Jericho without enduring the retarded puzzle-game boss fights the game forces you through?

The logic of this sort of reviewing forwards the idea that we must assess products not by our experience with them but instead by the experience that can potentially be had with them, under ideal circumstances with optimum interaction. This is a huge problem, both for reviewers and the people who play games who, statistics show, rarely actually finish their games (thanks for keeping track, Microsoft and Valve). Instead of having products that are assessed as the experiences they are we end up with products assessed as potential experiences, items that can be interacted with in a certain way if you’re willing to set aside the problems inherent to them and knuckle down.

When we do hear about these problems they’re usually of the technical variety, rather than problems of execution or design. They come out in reviews as nitpicky commentary on flaws rather than earnest statements about playing the game, flaws in the experience, flies in our ointment no less real for being constructed. It’s like talking about why you wanted to walk out of a movie rather than describing the moment you did. You might as well be telling us the feelings going through your head, complaining about why you wanted to stop playing rather than describing the tactile sensation of snapping the demo disc in your be-cheeoted hands. But this is a problem with the task itself, perhaps.

Games are so much a product of player experience that assessing them with any sort of objective process is doomed to failure, the same way that films and books cannot be reviewed in absence of the reader or viewer. There have been movements, small movements, to push towards some sort of disclosure from the people who assess games as to just how much they’ve played and how, but they’ve been furtive things. It seems all we’ve garnered from this movement is information on the version played by the reviewer and the manner in which it was procured. For the most part the people who read reviews seem to want some kind of authority in them, something they can assail or accept at leisure, a surety assailed by details a caveats.

They desire a simplification of the systems that they enjoy rather than a recognition or a discourse on the complexity of those systems. Some reviewers, like Tom Chick and Julian Murdoch, dole out this recognition, although they do so in a fashion that is often unrecognized and frequently met with outright hostility from the community. Some, like Chet and Erik of Old Man Murray fame, made a career out of parodying the completely absurd world of games reviews while simultaneously documenting their experiences with games, buried underneath layers upon layers of irony, but even Chet and Erik received more than their fair share of real life hate-mail.

Why, then, are we surprised when our industry seems broken? Our watchdogs, even those with the best of intentions, are met with hostility from all sides. Reviews that draw too much ire threaten the retention of the writer. Reviews that target the industry too harshly threaten ad sales and cooperation from developers and publishers. And the people who act as professionals, the people who treat games like just another medium to be assessed by critics, are met with outright aggression from the people they attempt to serve. The world of reviewing games is something of a mad world. And it is with this statement about the state of reviews that I preface my review of the first ten hours I spent playing Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicks Obscura, which I purchased from Good Old Games on Friday and played almost constantly from installation until starting this essay late on Sunday.

I purchased Arcanum based on the recommendation of a friend. He compared it favorably to games like Torment and Baldur’s Gate, old school RPGs that played hard and didn’t forgive mistakes gladly. I bought it because there weren’t a lot of games that I found particularly engaging on the market at present, and because money has been tight enough that I couldn’t afford the pricey few that I did. I bought it expecting a challenge, a challenge that was wrapped around an engrossing story that would suck me in and only occasionally let go for side-quests that would temporarily occupy my furtive attention.

Imagine my surprise when I was greeted with a genuinely funny introductory character rather than an overly serious role-player’s wet dream. A monk who is largely unfamiliar with the tenants of his own religion? Who is most adept at breaking and entering and beating the shit out of people? The world of Arcanum was far from what I expected, but I wasn’t disappointed. It had humor, the kind most games try for and fail miserably. It had that old school gameplay I loved, although I had to rework the game so that the combat functioned in turn-based mode since the default real-time mode moved so quickly that the entire experience was one big incoherent mess which usually ended with my corpse. It had a character creation process that, no shit, took me almost an hour to work through, considering I read and considered each and every background and racial makeup before I made my decision. This was a hard-assed game, a game that offered plenty of information and was willing to let me make mistakes if I didn’t pay attention to what was going on around me.

Or so I thought.

See, at first the somewhat directionless main story of the game, with its key notes of a nebulous ancient evil and a dying gnome handing me a very tiny package for an obscure child who some weird religious dudes might be involved with, was kind of enchanting. It made me think of how games used to function on loose plots like that, where you were expected to follow the main story because it was the main story, and not because of any particular ties to characters or the world itself.

But as the world unfolded around me, as I came to understand it better, I came to care less and less about following the story and more and more about seeing the world. Which wouldn’t be a problem if Arcanum was slightly less difficult. Because it is quite insanely difficult.

Let me lay out a situation for you. Let’s say you’re walking along in the wilderness. It’s your first big trip to a big city and you’re walking with your best buddy, Virgil, who seems to mean well enough. You see some wolves. By now you’re level 5. You’re pretty handy with a gun, but you’re low on bullets, but hey. They’re fucking wolves. A knife should do just as well, right? You’re a grown ass woman. You should be able to cut those mothers up.

Less than a minute later you and Virgil are both laying face down in your own blood. Turns out wolves are really hard to kill, especially when they get the drop on you. Never mind that you’ve been killing your way through droves and droves of their cousins, the ever present “ailing wolves,” or that you managed to take out those bandits with some fancy use of explosives and what little ammo you had left in your bandity pistol. You’ve just been undone by wolves. Regular, run of the mill wolves.

See, that’s the issue with Arcanum. While at first it’s all about throwing information at you it quickly decides to stop. Even with the open source manual Troika was kind enough to put up on their “defunct company” wiki, which is actually a really useful piece of internet, the game’s mechanics are puzzling. It took me almost three hours to figure out how to identify an item. I still have no idea just how strong a given enemy is until I fight them, even if I do notice the tiny display informing me of their level, which means that if I haven’t saved my game recently I might be setting myself up for disaster. Because engaging in a risky fight isn’t just not worth it – it’s almost always suicide given how harsh the combat system is and how frequently critical failures seem to occur for me.

It could just be my relatively low level, but I’ll find myself being punished for just walking around. I explored a noble’s basement, for example, soon after entering Tarant, and I was literally assraped by mechanical spiders. I figured “how tough can spiders be?” Turns out the answer is “incredibly fucking tough.” But the only way I’d ever know that is by fighting them. For all I know they could’ve been no tougher than those bandits I ploughed through, or those rats I stared down. Which is a problem.

It’s not a problem because the game is hard, you see. It’s a problem because the game doesn’t let you know how hard it’s going to be. I could fight off an army of Kite shamans and be fine, but a single mechano-spider will ruin me without batting a steel eyelash. This is really a complaint generated by the intensely pampered conditions of contemporary games, to be fair to Arcanum. Baldur’s Gate, one of my favorite games of all time, was completely willing to toss you to the wolves at its earliest convenience. But it did seem to, more or less, warn you when it was going to put you through the meat grinder. Arcanum does it almost at random. It is quite literally impossible to make your way out of the passage of stone leading away from the crash site at the beginning of the game at level 1. Trying is suicide, and will leave you swearing at your computer. Likewise exploring various areas without explicit prompting is punishing, and the environment will almost never provide you with useful information on present threats.

In Baldur’s Gate I’d always have a warning of some kind, or some context to explain why a given fight was so hard. The assassins early in the game progressed at a steady clip, for example, but they never completely obliterated you, and they were always clearly “boss battles” of a sort, a challenge to overcome so you could feel safe in a given area. With the exception of one set of warnings from some guards I’ve seen nothing of the like in Arcanum. Entering an unlocked basement in the middle of a city or an inhabited church with a few rats in have both proven fatal experiences. Which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but in a game without an autosave function it’s incredibly rough. It makes me want to stop playing.

At least for fifteen minutes. Then I come rolling back to Arcanum. As I mentioned in a previous essay I’m a glutton for this sort of punishment, the sort of game where learning the mechanics are a meta-game unto itself. But I’m completely aware that this is an oddity. It’s something that marks me as a subset of the gaming populace, an aberration who seeks out challenges, who makes his fun tougher than it needs to be. And make no mistake, Arcanum is hard. It makes the original Fallout look easy and transparent. It makes the combat of the first Baldur’s Gate look forgiving. And it makes the resource management of games like Halo: ODST and Call of Cthulhu seem downright generous. It’s a game that will hurt you for trying to play it, and if you want an incentive other than the challenge of the game to keep playing you’re not going to find one. The story so far is as generic and bullshitty as anything I’ve ever played, including the original Castlevania, and it doesn’t look to be changing its tune anytime soon.

But I’d still recommend Arcanum to that rare subset of people who play games for the challenge or to experience a unique and compelling world. Sure, it has bugs up the wazoo and you need to tweak the options of the game from their default settings to make it even remotely playable (change the combat to turn based and thank me later, seriously). But it has so much depth to it, so many original challenges and experiences to offer that if you play games for the old school purposes of overcoming some serious ass challenges Arcanum is simply a game you cannot ignore. And if you play games to immerse yourself in original fictional environments while largely ignoring the “main story?” Arcanum has that too. And it’s now on Good Old Games for five dollars. Hint hint.