Arco Review

Simplicity is often as underrated as it is underestimated. Arco, a joint development effort between Franek Nowotniak, José Ramón García, Antonio Uribe, and Max Cahill, is refined simplicity. Easy to dismiss as yet another pixel-art indie, Arco’s breezy aesthetic belies a tightly crafted, u­nique battle system and effortlessly moving script.

Arco moves like a short story collection, following a handful of characters through a series of thematically interwoven, and eventually interconnected, vignettes. A melange of violent descents into revenge and quiet, desperate slices of life on the frontier, Arco’s tales play out across a fantasy-infused Latin America in the grips of a European invasion. These “Newcomers” have wrought iron and fire on the land and the notorious Red Company, the closest head of the colonising hydra, has drawn blood from our protagonists in one way or another.

So across three chapters and a sliding scale of hours depending on your preferences for exploration and skill level with combat, Arco weaves its tapestry through expressive pixel art, refined systems, and remarkable self-confidence. Arco has the juice, the sauce, the rizz­– whatever you want to call it, Arco is dripping with it.

Arco’s world is gorgeously realised

Played out across sweeping pixel planes and modest combat arenas, Arco presents its overworld Super Mario style, replete with dotted lines and encounters along the way to any given goal or destination. Arriving transports your party (a traveling circus of plucky animals and wayward souls can join your caravan throughout the journey and assist in combat) into typically single screen tableaus in which you can freely navigate, chat with locals, play minigames, the works.

In these towns and unimportant fields, you’ll find Arco’s heart, thrumming to its own unique rhythm. A game that so centrally focuses on colonisation and oppression is by its nature likely to be sharper than most, and Arco’s reflections on its subject matter are achingly earnest and unfaltering. Viewed both through the lens of its protagonists and revolving door supporting cast, Arco delicately balances heightened celebrations of South American cultures with sombre mourning of the ways in which those same cultures have been violently crushed by colonialism.

With minimal pixel-art, Arco achieves a level of cinematic quality

Unflinching but rarely unkind, Arco is shot through with small touches that elevate its tension without minimising it. On a small bluff I stumble upon some traveling Tuag taking in the view. We exchange guarded pleasantries, I offer to share the meat I hunted earlier but they decline, cultural differences. Later, I find some cheese and return to the bluff and we break bread. Recognising something in each other, they offer me some priceless crafting supplies and the view becomes a shared moment. Later, a bounty hunter crosses my path and with hands on iron and bow we size each other up. A quick joke, ice broken, and we share that meat from earlier and he gifts me a bounty mark to try my hand at it. I don’t know if these moments could have broken bad or differently had I reacted differently, my guess is yes given the game’s focus on the moral fallout off your choices in its world, but it also doesn’t matter all that much. In the moment, it felt right, and on reflection, it stayed with me.

Or my favourite fleeting story, the lost goat whose presence in my party became so integral to fending off the loneliness of the road that when I found his owner and we parted ways, my heart delicately cracked and closed off just a little from whoever I may meet next on the trail. Arco is a game with dozens of these instances, its writing and mise-en-scène so complete and full that its minimalist pixel art and subdued score become as cinematic and evocative as the latest fidelity chasers in the space.

Combat in Arco is engaging, unique, and a total blast

Arco extrapolates frontier violence into short, controlled bursts of combat that nestle somewhere between turn-based and real-time. From a range of abilities and moves (neatly expandable through the game’s variety of skill trees) you’ll choose your hero’s actions in a suspended state while your foes do the same. With the hold of a bumper, you can glimpse the paths your enemies will take in their moves so you can attempt to loose an arrow in the right direction or move out of harm’s way, a dozen micro-considerations measured and judged before they play out when time resumes and the world lurches with conflict and resolution.

All of this is communicated through unintrusive UI and intuitive trial and error of systems and skills. Difficulty escalates in largely seamless ways too, though you’ll be chasing EXP and healing goods in the overworld before tackling the game’s more elaborate combat encounters. Arco also seeks to fold in your narrative choices as certain actions taken during story beats will manifest as ghostly apparitions of guilt capable of royally ruining your best laid moves and plans. So, you do your best to lay your demons to rest as you gage distances, make hopeful lobs, and pray you can make it out of harm’s way before some gunslinger’s sights find their mark.

Final Thoughts

And so it goes in Arco, a series of near misses and scrappy brawls punctuating short adventures to overgrown temples, sparse yet majestic fields, and towns full of people trying their best. It isn’t a particularly showy game; outside of its immediately impressive pixel work and general art direction it’s difficult to convey in screenshots just how full an experience it offers. But give Arco a chance and watch it unfurl before you, let yourself be taken by its small moments, its ruminations on life, and its fucking banger combat systems and scenario designs.

It has more on its mind than its killer design impulses of course and with few words and fewer pixels its musings moved me again and again. The world can be a harsh place, likely to break you at any given moment, but Arco asks us to remember that a shared meal and a kind word can at least start to put you back together if you just stop and offer it in turn.

Reviewed on Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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