Spent the last couple weeks playing through Arx: Fatalis thanks to the discussion in a recent thread. If you're interesting in giving it a try, I highly recommend playing it through the open source version titled Arx: Libertatis. The game is great if you're into immersive sims, it plays very similarly to Thief and Deus Ex. You play as a stranger with amnesia who finds himself stuck in the world of Arx, an underground fortress inhabited by several extant races, making due with the subterranean life they subsist in against the harsh outer, cold, dead surface world. Rather quickly you become embroiled in the goings on between them, and before long make yourself known as a champion against the coming dangers of a hidden cult worshiping a slighted, envious god. Literally just finished it a few moments ago, and wanted to share some of my thoughts:
It's very fun. I played it a few years back and didn't finish it then, but having given it another go I really do appreciate the roundabout design a lot of the levels have and how much thought really had to have been put into their design. Plus, there's quite a lot you can miss on your first playthrough so giving it a second go around really opens your eyes up to how many options really were available initially. The game came out around the same time as some of the later King's Field games and may have taken inspiration from them; the game world itself is built shockingly similar to a Dark Souls title in design. It's essentially one giant cave system, with the surviving kingdoms spread out over several floors of it after the sun died and the surface world froze over: Humans and Goblins live near the surface levels, Snake Women and Rat Men live in the deeper levels, the Dwarves live in the deepest since the previous floors were part of the mine they had previously excavated. Sometimes you'll be sent back through a previously explored area, often to talk to a specific character or return to a place you couldn't originally access. But you'll also inevitably discover shortcuts from the fifth floor up the fourth, or the second to the third, and so on in ways that make sense diagetically. Including a warp system linked to each floor unlocked about halfway through the game.
Praise:
-There is a lot of interactivity for what really only tries to be a decent RPG. The goal of the game is combat and exploration, but it also provides the ability to fish, combine ingredients to make better foods, cook things by placing them in front of fires, experiment with the runes you have to discover new spells, and interacting with objects and actors in the environment (even if it's just clicking on a spit over a fire to make it spin or a chicken to make it cluck). btw, you can click on a chicken ten times to make it explode into a cooked chicken.
-For being restricted to such a limited environment, there's an appreciable variety of enemies to actually come across. You've got rats, spiders, goblins, trolls, and zombies, but also liches, mummies, demons, cultists, Ylsides (cult warriors), snake women, golems, rat men, and even an optional dragon to fight.
-The game repects the player's own agency pretty well, especially for a lot of the earlier areas. If you don't want to waste time talking to the trolls or goblins, you can just kill them and take what you need from them. The same can be said for numerous figures in the game, though it does make achieving some goals significantly more difficult. Additionally, some quests can be completed in the same vein by just killing someone or stealing something instead of bargaining or working for it like stealing Krahoz from the rebel camp, completely skipping the crpyts as an area and missing out on like 1/3 of the game.
-The game also respects the player's time to a good degree. If there's a mechanic that needs a pickaxe or a puzzle that needs a fireball or levitation spell, chances are you'll find one of those lying around relatively close. Plus, there's a spell explicitly for making you run around the map faster.
-Spoilers: The main character isn't actually a human, but the avatar of a Guardian sent from another world. This gets revealed relatively early in the game, but that fact really helps to sell the voice actor's slightly stitled, awkward performance. He's not really human, or used to his body, he's just mouthing out the words that he knows through intuition as a mystic being make sense.
-There are some very nice looking environments in the game, which again I didn't really experience fully on my first playthrough. Swampy cavers, dusty crypts, spider dens, stony temples... fleshy cult dens, icy caverns, molten remains of deserted workshops. For taking place in one singular cave system, it's impressive how much variety the game designers packed into the world.
Gripes:
-The game is still very janky despite being incredibly well-designed and detailed. Several mechanics (platforming, combining items, placing items, casting spells) are difficult to get the hang of and can sometimes just outright not work even if you appear to be doing the right thing. The crypt puzzle especially was very frustrating to solve, despite my initial suspicion being correct. Firstly, there's a chasm of lava you don't find any way to cross. You just jump/levitate over it or tank the damage. Then in the actual puzzle's room, you don't have to match the inner symbols with the moon phase they belong to, but instead the outer symbol closer to an "arrow" that blends in with the platform's design. Placing the stones with those symbols also made me wonder if I was doing something wrong, since setting them down on top of each pillar left them floating noticeably off of them like it wasn't intended.
--Several mechanics don't work exactly the way you'd think, notably a lot of the spells. Casting heal heals you and any nearby enemies. Levitation doesn't let you fly freely, just hover horizontally across the map. A lot of status-boosting spells, like bless and speed don't give you a flat bonus for X seconds, but instead are constant effect spells that drain your mana indefinitely until you run out.
--(This could a plus depending on your opinion but) Very little is actually spelled out directly to the player, both in terms of mechanics and objectives. That works pretty well when you're thrown into a goblin kingdom and have to figure out how to finagle your way around to come out on top and with their king's good graces, but not so much when you're explicitly told to talk to someone or do something, but to accomplish that you have to use a specific item on a person or interact with one specific thing in the environment to get the proper response. It doesn't help that sometimes events just immediately happen and drag you into a cutscene instead.
-There are several points in the game where you hit a pretty massive difficulty spike, the most notable being when you run into Ylsides for the first time, either in the temple or back in Arx. If you try to fight them like any other enemy (approach, bait out attack, counterattack) you're going to get your ass reamed. They almost necessarily require magic, either through damaging spells or through buffing yourself and casting debuffs on them to actually overcome since they have an immediate attack and movement speed buff they cast that lets them stunlock and devastate your health if you're not paying attention.
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