Arcanum Demo Review

The techno-colonial-holocaustic RPG with character depth to spare, Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obsura is the type of game where the graphics probably won’t amaze, but it has the capacity to make up for that with its complexity and story. Since this game has been in development news for quite awhile, most of our hopes have hit a high point at some time or another, which were then somewhat satiated with the mediocre beta reviews of a few months ago.

Most recently there’s been the announcement that, to everyone’s surprise (smirks), the game has been labeled with “we’re not done yet.” However, the recent demo up for grabs at FilePlanet among other places nevertheless surfaced a couple days ago… which may cause some people including me to wonder just why if it’s months away, it is released now. I suppose there’s a logical explanation… to buoy interest, hopefully long enough until release time this late summer. Hope though, that it doesn’t turn around and bite them in the behind later if it doesn’t represent the good of the game.

Here on my 2400bps modem it’s a little hard to snag the 250 megs the demo requires, so I’m assuming that what the gang at Terra Arcanum had to say about its qualities, drawbacks and depth in a nicely written review of the demo is for the most part true. A bit relinquished to the copy & paste method:

In addition to race, you can further customize your character by choosing a Background for your character. These are basically things that were part of your character’s life prior to boarding that fateful blimp that have changed the way your character is in some significant manner. These changes have both a positive and a negative effect.

For example, one such Background is Escaped Lunatic which gives you bonus resistances to several types of damage, but makes people react in a less positive manner to you. Another Background is Neitszche’s Poster Child which gives you a bonus to experience, but makes you critically miss and fumble a lot more, because of the infamous, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger” thing.

As you can see, there’s a good deal of humor in the creation of a character in Arcanum, as there was in previous games by the same people.