A tale of Mesoamerican magic and vindication, Arco mixes genres and playstyles to deliver one of the most unique and engaging games all year.
Arco is so good. It’s insanely good. Trying to describe it takes a lot, but at its core it’s a turn-based, real-time action game set in Mexican America, not real America, but very much a Blood Meridian-inspired Mexican Texas region. We play as four different characters, four interlocking road stories in which we need to fight back against the Red Company and its colonizing ways. And the cool thing is that even though it’s written really well, and the story is really good, the gameplay is kind of where it shines.
Every character plays different, and our decisions throughout the game change how the battles work. So normally, it’s a turn-based game where enemies aim and shoot at us, and we can run and sort of curve around bullets. But if we make bad decisions that make our guilty conscience heavier, the gameplay starts becoming faster. It becomes a real-time game, instead of being a turn-based game. So instead of being a turn-based bullet hell, it becomes a real-time bullet hell. That tie between the narrative and gameplay is really innovative, and satisfying.
And while we’re in these battles, we get these things called ghosts that will kind of appear and chase after us and bog us down. We obviously don’t want that. So we have to make other choices in the story to get rid of these ghosts and bring the gameplay back to being more turn-based game.
It is so freaking cool, so fun. Every fight feels crazy, different.
We also get to level up our character and choose their skills, allocating to a select amount of slots. So we have to be thoughtful with how we build our character, but it also gives us customization to how we want to play. We can also recruit other characters throughout our stories, so we can have multiple people with unique skillsets and traits. Do I want one of my characters to be able to stab but can also cancel the machine guns? Sure. And then I can have my other guy use a crossbow to shoot people at range.
I really like the art style because it’s very unassuming. It almost feels like playing with little action figures, but when we actually sit down and read the text of what’s going on in the story, it is so much more than the sum of its parts.
This game is really heavy, deep, and kind of an examination of colonialism; it’s not a light hearted game. It’s very dark and heavy and kind of disgusting, but I like that a lot. It’s one of the best games of the year.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher/PR. It first appeared on The SideQuest for September 27, 2024. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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