The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 10th

Today's door hides a game we missed

Today’s advent calendar pick is one of 2024’s finest games we missed. It troubles our dreams and waking moments alike. It mushrooms in our peripheral vision and drifts towards us as we batter out advent calendar posts, hoping we can finish writing and beat a tactical withdrawal to the kitchen before the accusatory phantom overwhelms us. It’s a game about sin and projectile patterns and llamas. It’s...

...Arco!

Edwin: I’m still struggling to decide how seriously to take Arco. It can look cartoonish and almost cuddly, with its gnat-sized characters hippity-hopping across luxurious, single-screen landscapes, and its taste for temples that look like buried, leering faces. The battling is freeze-time tactical positioning with bullet hell elements, set to swaggering guitar: it’s bouncy arcade fare with respectable intricacy. The dialogue can be quite quippy, as well: sometimes, it makes me think of Sword & Sworcery. But all that jollity goes hand in hand with stories about communities being slaughtered by invaders, about lingering mistrust and colonial cruelty and feelings of remorse that soak the Mesoamerican scenery like oil.

As a microcosm for this spread of tones, take the combat’s guilt system, which causes toothy spectres to materialise semi-randomly and waft insidiously towards you in real-time, while you pick abilities and set movement or aiming trajectories. You could read it as a harrowing commentary on ‘losing time’ to trauma, or a McCarthy-ish modelling of cosmic justice. You could also read it as an affectionate joke about both those things. The ghosts vaguely resemble the ones in Mario haunted house levels, though sadly you can’t immobilise them by gawping at them.

Arco’s battle system is by some distance its best feature. The splicing of freeze-time and bullet hell works so artfully you wonder that it hasn’t been done quite this way before. Each skirmish unfolds on a single screen map, and typically sees you either outnumbered or outgunned, which obliges you to position yourself just-so and deftly manage the cooldowns and energy cost of your various unlockable abilities.

The constraints on ability usage are such that victory often hinges on a single choice backed up by careful calculation. Make some space, or commit to a kill? Smash the boss with that big move you’ve been saving, or interrupt one of their attacks? Each playable character is a distinct operator with a florid but bracingly specific toolset - for example, a warrior who can build a multiplier with successive jabs, but lacks any initial ranged attacks. There are also terrain elements to make use of, such as plants that replenish your mana or spray lethal petals when struck.

The only thing I’m cool on with Arco is the quest flow. It’s all very go-to-A-and-fight-B, with a possible detour through cave C to flush out optional treasure D. It’s no worse than in any other pixelart RPG with an overworld/dungeon/combat arena split, however. And the world itself is engrossing, with its gargantuan forest slugs and touches of spaghetti western. Besides, if you’re weary of backtracking to questgivers, you can always pick the eventual destination and put your character on autopilot, which transforms the game into an album of mysterious places.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!