A few hours with New Arc Line reminded me that setting doesn’t mean much in an RPG if the characters aren’t interesting

Hands on with the upcoming Steampunk CRPG

When the trailer for steampunk RPG New Arc Line released in April, I was immediately taken in by its premise. To my shame, I’ve never gotten around to the social tensions and magic-meets-technology world of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. A newer, shinier journey to a similar setting sounded like just the ticket. After spending a few hours with the preview build, I do have at least one bit of very positive news to share: I’m definitely going to play Arcanum now, because despite some fetching environments and potentially interesting social systems, New Arc Line just isn’t doing it for me.

If you missed that trailer, the setup here is that you’re an immigrant travelling to New Arc - a supposed shining beacon of progress that’s actually rotten at the core with corruption, danger, and prejudice. The trailer opened with a vignette showing an elven mother escaping captivity with her sick child, but my own entrance to the city was a lot less fraught. A customs officer in a bobby hat warned me about magic (magic I’d later cast openly on the streets to no reprisal - Athkatla, I miss you everyday). Then he told me how nice he thought elves were, and sent me on my merry way. My first quest: find my suitcase. Love a bit of luggage-based questing, I do.

But first: character creation. The preview build features two species (elf and human), and two classes - ‘diesel engineer’ or, uh, ‘voodoo shaman’. I went with the second because I liked the coat, chose elf, and proceeded to create the character I always do when out of better ideas: Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie with ridiculous conversation stats. I picked the ‘outsider’ trait for stronger magic and because the wording - "your debts in this world grow faster" - was suitably mysterious. You’ll allocate starting points to stats - constitution, strength etc - and skills, which are the more nuanced, interesting bits like survival and observation. I went hard on charm until I noticed a skill named ‘mockery’. Truly, the curse of the hack critic runs deep.

Before you enter New Arc proper, there’s a bit of in medias rice krispies. Elf Bowie finds himself in a crumbling city reeling from a dragon attack, in a hospital gown, and you have to very slowly stagger out. Remember when Phantom Pain did this and it was a touch tedious but ultimately effective because it’s a third person action game where you’re given a real sense of your character’s ailing physicality? Well, remove that physicality and you’re just left with tedium, I’m afraid. Plod plod. The wrecked city is striking, at least; immediately conveying that split between nature and industry, all strewn massive coggery and luminous, reptile-skinned flora. Unfortunately, I can’t fully appreciate it because the camera keeps getting snagged on things.

There’s a few introductory skill tests as you make your way through the wreckage. A dwarf plummeted to his death when I lost my grip on the stretcher he was hanging on to, a couple jumped to their deaths when I failed to convince them life was worth living, an impaled human bled to death when I failed to find him help - tragic events of that nature. At one point, I got attacked by a lad accusing me of having caused the current chaos, and this came up again in another conversation. Ah, so this is all my fault? Interesting.

I eventually limp my way to safety, and it cuts to a scene between my character and a judge. I’m being interrogated for possessing agitprop. This scene sets up the political situation of the world quite well, although some of the writing and subsequent choices are less on-the-nose than they are up-the-nostrils: "Is it fair to mistreat someone just because they’re different?" reads one option. Must we really kick a homeless orphan in the face just because the system has deemed them a scruffy no-coin?

I’m going to skip ahead here, because the writing really is the soul of any good CRPG, and this is where New Arc Line most failed to grab me. The prose itself is quite good! I slapped a bystander to alertness at one point and the description of how his spittle soothed the burn on my cheek from the cigarette he’d also spat at me was nicely vivid. There’s some cute accented flourishes, too: "my sniffer feels like a plate of mashed taters".

The issue, for me, was in the character archetypes. Aforementioned mashed-nose is a beefy bruiser-type that joins your party early, and there’s nothing to him really. He’s big and likes hitting people and sniffing magic cocaine and probably pronounces ‘thug’ as ‘tug’ and that’s about it. To gain access to a new area, I have to endear myself to a theatre troupe, and the playwright is every lazy, vaguely homophobic trope of an overly precious, flamboyant and effete artist you could fit on a plate of mashed taters. I’m supposed to help prompt his real script to his actors after they’ve been given an edited version stuffed with syndicate propaganda, and he trill-ingly refers to the syndicate leader as "a douchebag who never even had a manicure". I feel like I’ve heard every line before it comes out of his mouth.

That quest is interesting, by the way. As the play goes on, I’m given sets of choices between lines and have to identify the original script from the syndicate propaganda. It’s not too taxing, sure, but I appreciate what it conveys about the stranglehold that the syndicates have on art in this world. Not something I’ve experienced before, if terrible memory serves.

Let’s wind back a bit. Before I meet the playwright, I have to find my suitcase with the help of my bruiser mate. Along the way, I discover a fun, risk-reward pickpocketing minigame, and also loot a few suitcases right next to their owners to no reaction. Occasionally, the game performs perception checks automatically. I’m not entirely sure what they actually do, but I think it’s loot related. I follow an objective marker to where my suitcase is supposed to be, some rodents-of-unusual-size jump out from a bin, and it’s time for combat.

Tradition dictates that a description of combat gets its own paragraph, but if you’ve played any turn-based combat with action points before, it really doesn’t need one. A slight twist here is that everyone gets an armour bar above their health that restores to full every turn automatically. I can perhaps see this becoming interesting later on, maybe offering the chance to spec out aggro tank characters, or force you to keep a certain level of agression up to avoid losing momentum. As far as these early combat encounters go, however, all it does is make them drag out an age - especially noticeable as you have so few options this early.

And that, eventually, was why I ended up quitting the preview build instead of poking around for secrets and sidequests, as I’d originally planned. I got into a fight with some tech zombies, there were five or so of them, and each one was taking me multiple turns to put down. I was already souring on the thing due to the writing issues mentioned earlier, and because I’d nicked a very elaborate hammer right in front of the carnival barker running the hammer game and he said absolutely nothing to me. The drudgery of combat was the last straw. I do think the bones are here for a decent CRPG in a potentially interesting setting, but it's safe to to say the game doesn't put its best foot forward. Hopefully it's hiding in that nifty coat somewhere. Me? Arcanum, here I come.