Save you a click: it's Arcanum. Great game btw.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Gosh, it was really a great game. It had twists and meaningful choices and a world that truly felt immersive. The combat was utter shite though :D
Yeah and the magic was so much better than the tech route. Who wants to run around and buy restock supplies for teach abilities when magic is free.
Plus carry around literal tons of garbage required to craft stuff so you're always overencumbered and your inventory is full, plus spending half your playtime in menus as you're looting, buying and sorting every component you find.
And with magic you can even get banned from using the train :D
I was banned anyway as I brought the dog around.
You should have shot up the train company then :D
My first playthrough was with the tech route; why wouldn't I pick such option considering the setting (fantasy world undergoing industrialization)?
I eventually found a super cheesy approach that made tech fights relatively easy.
You could make tons of molotovs for cheap (parts would respawn in the garbage bins). I think I figured out some way to dump a huge number of them without using AP or minimal AP.
While I love Arcanum, the world was one of kind (especially for the time), combat was not satisfying at all.
I remember buying this game off the back of how much I loved the Baldur's Gate games (I and II, at the time), playing it for like 30 minutes and getting so frustrated I just went and replayed Baldur's Gate II again. I'm sure I still have my physical disc somewhere. I probably should give it more of a chance.
I'm not sure how it aged, but i distinctly recall it having "real time combat", that i don't think even the developers tried before shipping. With that turned off, it is barely usable, but even then i recall at the beginning what kind of items you find randomly in the first few hours very much determine how easy the early game will be.
with all that said, it is still worth playing for the story and the npcs though. it was a story crafted with love.
I started it two times and quit soon after battling with awful interface and ridiculous starting difficulty. On the third try, though, I persisted and the game revealed otself to be amazing. It is the first RPG that I immediately restarted after its end to try a completely new character build (I'm usually "been there, done that" for replayability), and it rewarded me with completely new facets of its story. A true gem among cRPGs, try to persist through its starting hours.
All true!
I wouldn't call it a "great game" outright. Granted, I played it for the first time back in the beginning of this year so I don't have any nostalgia goggles.
It has a lot of great ideas, and some great parts - like the half ogre conspiracy. But a lot of it feels half baked, clunky and unfinished. Even with fan patches.
And that's not even going into the the absolutely abysmally godawful shitshow of the combat (and there is a lot of combat in Arcanum), which has to be the worst isometric CRPG combat by a Texas mile. The only thing worse than combat in general is the AI. There was a really funny mage companion I wanted to bring along, but instead of using his spells he just ran into melee and started pummelling with his fists each combat. Brilliant!
I played it before there were a lot of great alternatives, so there's that. I think the novelistic CRPGs of that era deserved to remain more of a trend in the industry than they did. Bethesda made a lot of money turning away from wordsy games in favour of shorter, more simplistic gameplay loops, and it's hard not to be a little bitter about that. Original recipe Fallout, Arcanum, earlier Elder Scrolls entries, and Planescape: Torment left me with a permanent itch that more modern games never really try hard enough to scratch.
I don't know, there is a bit of a revival for it. Pillars of Eternity 1&2, Pathfinder: Kingmaker & Wrath of the Righteous and just now The Necromancer's Tale. There are modern games out there.
And if wordy is all you want don't forget about Pentiment!
I second Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It is an amazing game, even if the Pathfinder game system feels overcomplicated and very hard to get into
I think it has quite a few issues, not least its length (I had a like 230h playthrough I think which is... too much). Its high points are really high, but the lows are pretty low. The encounter design towards the endgame especially leaves a lot to be desired.
It's still worthwhile checking out if you're a fan of the old Infinity Engine CRPGs it clearly draws inspiration from. I've also heard Wrath of the Righteous is much better, but it's still on my backlog.
All favourited to be gotten ASAP. I can't wait to get into Necromancer's Tale especially. Not for the first time you've brought some hella good recommendations. Thanks!
I even forgot the pick of the bunch: Disco Elysium! If you like Planescape: Torment especially you just have to play it. It's more of a visual novel than a "game" in my opinion, but if you let it count as a game then it's the best game of all time.
Not for the first time you've brought some hella good recommendations. Thanks!
Oh what other game did I suggest? I do like to rant a lot in the weekly "What are you playing?" threads.
It might have been Disco Elysium before. I loved my time with it, I might just have to watch someone else's play through just to get to an ending. I always get too sad to finish my runs.
Watching other people play it is the only way to relive it, anyway. First time reactions to the Final Dream hit like crack.
By the way I forgot another CRPG recommendation: SKALD: Against the Black Priory. Shorter and more limited in scope than the others, but a really nice tight game with a concise story and no filler. Played it earlier this year and really loved it.
I'm really feeling smug about having tagged your username as "good taste in video games" right about now. SKALD looks like such a treat!
I keep forgetting about tags, that makes more sense for you recognising me than me being some sort of household name around here 😂
I'd subscribe to your blog, anyway. Cheers!
Another game done by the same people that did the Pathfinder ones is Warhammer: Rogue Trader. It’s not perfect by any means (you can tell they rushed at the end) but I had a blast playing it.
EDIT: Also another game worth playing is Tyranny. A bit shorter than the other entries but also very well done.
Pieces in place? He's fishing for a deal.
This is one that I read in the magazine, but the demo wouldn’t load on my pc, so I never got to play it.
I didn’t realise it was in gog’s preservation program.
Arcanum is one of my favorites