Arco, a weirdly stressful yet enthralling blend of action and strategy, is one of the early standouts of the Steam Next Fest.
Made by just a handful of developers, Arco puts you in the shoes of an explorer deep in the jungle, challenging you to make it all the way to a temple and uncover the treasure within. Unfortunately, just about everything between you and the temple is trying to kill you.
Arco is played from a semi-top-down perspective, so you're effectively controlling your little pixelated explorer from above. You and any enemy characters take turns effectively trying to outmanoeuvre and stab each other to death, before the other one can, in turn, stab you to death.
Battles freeze before you take an action, and you can plot out where you want to go, or what you want to do. You might choose to stride towards an enemy and plunge your dagger into them, but if they've got a marker denoting an attack above their head, it means they're also planning on bludgeoning you with some weapon.
So Arco becomes a game of cat and mouse - you need to keep out of your opponent's range while they're attacking, and then rapidly close the gap to strike them as soon as they're done. You'll quickly recognize symbols associated with certain attacks, like three dots that means you're going to need to outrun a wall of orbs, or a line denoting an aerial slam attack.
Arco is mercifully pretty chill about the whole death thing. It's pretty easy to drop dead when you can only be hit two or three times before biting the dust, but rather than put you right back at the beginning in a roguelike twist, Arco instead just lets you try each individual combat encounter again.
In terms of the wider game though, there's neat little choices peppered all around Arco's in-game map zones. You might stumble upon a rock and lift it up, only to be greeted with a skeleton or horde of worms. They're really low-stakes choices, more aimed at pleasant interactivity with the wider world instead of life-or-death scenarios.
Arco's demo is out right now on Steam, and it'll take you right around half an hour to play the entire thing from front to back. If you're all done with the story mode, there's an arena-based mode where mobs of enemies are thrown at you to really test your mastery of the tactics systems.
Check out our upcoming indie games guide for a full look at all the other exciting small-time titles hitting PC and consoles in the near future.
