As a CRPG fan of a certain vintage, I have a lot of fondness for Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines developer Troika's fantasy steampunk RPG. But it's now over two decades old, and still incredibly rough around the edges (and, frankly, everywhere else), so it's not the most playable RPG romp in 2024. Which is why I found myself eager to play New Arc Line, another fantasy steampunk CRPG, which recently launched in early access.
OK, so here's the deal: Magic used to rule the world, but that was something of an issue for most people. Reality was constantly in flux, and it turns out that kinda gets in the way of just living your life. But the Big Bad Sorcerer running the show was brought down by a hero—they do love to meddle, those heroes—which ushered in a new age of progress and technology. Magic is still hanging around, but it isn't really trusted.
The city of New Arc is the heart of all this progress, but finding the promise of this land of prosperity a wee bit suspect you—human or elf, engineer or voodoo practitioner, at least in this early access build—take a trip to the New World to see what's going on across the ocean. And that's where New Arc Line begins. With you searching for your lost luggage.
Well, sorta. It actually begins a few months later, in medias res, after a disaster that you seem to be at the centre of causes some apocalypse-level devastation, leaving you injured and wearing a hospital gown. But you don't get to learn much about that before you're kicked back to the docks, as you arrive in this fantastical mechanical city.
Two things are immediately apparent: New Arc Line is very much a classic, tabletop-inspired CRPG, full of dice rolls and skill checks, along with turn-based brawls. It also constantly lurches all over the place when it comes to the quality of its writing—so much so that it's hard to get a firm grip on.
Awkward bants
As I got to know the residents of New Arc, the dialogue fluctuated wildly between crude banalities and flowery prose—one minute I'd be listening to a pissed-up dwarf moaning and swearing, accompanied by a monotone vocal performance awkwardly juxtaposed to his slapstick antics, and then I'd be treated to an unnecessarily overwrought description from the game's narrator, evoking the kind of purple prose you might see in a community theatre script, all contained within a single conversation.
As I got to know the residents of New Arc, the dialogue fluctuated wildly between crude banalities and flowery prose.
There's just a jarringly inconsistent tone. Sometimes New Arc Line attempts to capture the patter of the era that inspired the setting, broadly the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it frequently veers into anachronistic modern slang, and even instructive text can come off as weirdly casual and conversational, like when the game refers to an NPC as "a guy".
New Arc Line doesn't put its best foot forward when it comes to the initial set of goals, or the first companion it throws at you: the abrasive brawler, and one of the city's giants, Mick. Right off the bat, I'm told to pay off his debt to a bookie, because it's apparently my fault he got knocked out in a competitive brawl. For the record, I had nothing to do with it. I showed up, he waved to me, he got knocked out. It's not my fault that this musclebound giant has a glass jaw. But you just need to go with it.
This was among the first of many tasks I was set—scraping together some cash. Only then would I be able to continue on my epic quests to… erm, find my luggage? New Arc Line really likes sending you on fetch quests, constantly trying to get you to find people and things. To get into the city proper, for instance, I had to pose as a theatre director's assistant, and my first job was, naturally, to round up his drunken thespians, scattered throughout the area. There's a lot of busywork.
By this point, I'd already had an encounter with the aforementioned boozy dwarf, watched my companion snort a magical drug, been offered said drug (I said yeah, why not, because I didn't want him to feel bad), and discovered that the theatre director also liked to partake. So early in a fantasy RPG, it's off-putting for so much of the focus to be on people getting high—something I would have perhaps found more entertaining when I was 16 and it was still a novelty.
But there's something to be said for the playful silliness of it all, eschewing the sometimes staid trappings of the fantasy genre. When I encountered a depressed alcoholic later on, he was under the sway of a literal green fairy (a nod to absinthe's nickname), who I then had to bargain with (or beat up) to rescue the unfortunate lush. Bullets, it turns out, are a great hangover cure.
Big picture
While the moment-to-moment writing isn't impressive, the narrative has got its hooks in me. The relationship between magic and technology that sits at the centre of New Arc Line spits out some genuinely compelling scenarios, and there's also an interesting interplay between the narrative and mechanics, allowing you to decide what happens when these two competing philosophies clash.
When I found the thespians, for instance, there wasn't any time for them to learn the edited script. One of the city's politicians had mangled it with his red pen to better reflect his vision for the city, promoting the views of the technologists and celebrating his accomplishments. To make sure the play went off without a hitch, I was told to provide the actors with prompts, allowing me to determine the outcome of the play.
My class and background placed me firmly in the technologist camp (without locking me into it), and it did seem like magic was something of a menace. Only moments earlier, I'd discovered a woman who had been transformed (by herself) into a bottle of gin. So I opted to go with the edited script. The play itself amounted to nothing more than three NPCs standing on a simple stage reading some lines, but it had a significant impact: pushing the area more towards technology, which benefited me not just as someone who didn't trust magic, but also by increasing the potency of my technological abilities.
This rivalry continues to be the focus throughout the early access build, as you start to meddle in the city's politics and keep finding ways to pursue one of the two agendas. Even the way you interact with the environment, like repairing mechanical gizmos, moves the dial. But the tumult engulfing the city goes beyond the simple magic vs technology conflict, especially once you get to dig into how New Arc Line's ideologies affect regular people.
As a CRPG sicko the systems that prop it up are exactly my kind of shit.
Just like the real Industrial Revolution, there are concerns about automation taking away jobs, and how all this progress can heighten the struggle of the already impoverished. With all of 2024's concerns over the impact of AI, the issues facing the citizens of New Arc don't feel a million miles away from reality. Ironically, the game does leverage AI's generative abilities, both when it comes to some of the art and localisation—though in the case of the latter, at least, this is just an early access concession, and developer Dreamate aims to provide "professional localisation" for Ukrainian, Spanish, German, French, Simplified Chinese and Russian at launch.
The big picture stuff is very much up my street, and even though New Arc Line is inconsistent in its quality, as a CRPG sicko the systems that prop it up are exactly my kind of shit. Like Baldur's Gate 3, the dice rolls are never far away, with skill checks popping off all the time, whether you're just walking down the street or chatting up some of the locals. Observation will help you spot NPCs you need to talk to, for instance, while insight will let you determine if someone is being less than honest with you.
High roller
Though hardly novel for a CRPG, there's still a thrill when you pass an observation check and get a big description of an NPC, providing you with extra information that will help you to make informed dialogue choices. You get to feel like you've peeled back the curtain a bit: not a gormless tourist anymore, but a savvy detective, ferreting out clues and motives. Passing skill checks also nets you more tangible rewards, like getting your mitts on previously out of reach loot.
And as you build out your party, their skills are at your disposal, shoring up any weaknesses. Not a chatty type? No worries: your giant pal Mick will happily intimidate any NPCs who are less than free with their information. New Arc Line does front load the adventure with engineer companions, though, so if you're looking for variety, you might want to go down the magic route yourself. That said, your buddies still have their specialities within that broad class, and you can then develop them as you see fit, finding them their own niches.
I wasn't as convinced by the early combat, where my options were largely limited to just hitting or shooting things. Thankfully, things do start to pick up steam fairly quickly. You'll start to get your hands on new types of ammo, grenades, and all sorts of weird gizmos, like telekinetic gloves and fancy steampunk boots. Some just augment your existing combat abilities, but others give you entirely new ones, offering new attacks or some handy utility. A lot of this will be crafted, but New Arc is filled to the brim with loot, and some quests will reward you with multiple items for a variety of builds.
At first, I favoured diplomacy over violence—and I appreciate the fact that this is so often an option—but once I got my hands on some dual-wielding pistols which let me pull off trickshots and counter-attacks, I became positively aggressive, looking for any excuse to kick off. Even though it has a loose, slightly janky quality, once the combat options start racking up, murder begins to hold a great deal of appeal.
A few hours in, things had started to click, with the flaws buried underneath a bevy of systems and the constant drip of choice and consequence.
A few hours in, things had started to click, with the flaws buried underneath a bevy of systems and the constant drip of choice and consequence—the hallmark of a good CRPG. Where before I had merely liked what it was trying to do, by the time I was well into my quest I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I needed little motivation to continue exploring the bizarre city as it spat out a colourful array of surprises conjured up by the juxtaposition of magic and modernity.
New Arc de Triomphe
It's a striking setting that manages to tease out lots of oddities, even though both fantasy and steampunk are well trodden settings, and it's a city built for sauntering: every street and corner tries to catch your eye with shops, quest-givers, peculiar contraptions and, of course, containers full of loot. It's a lively, bustling place, and one of the most fetching isometric RPGs I've played—at least when it comes to the environment. Character models are less impressive, and it seems to be impossible to equip anyone with gear that doesn't clip.
While I enjoyed my trips across the city, what I absolutely did not enjoy was the terrible optimisation. Even with my beefy rig (RTX 4090, Intel i9-13900k, 32GB RAM), I frequently had to contend with frame rates as low as 20. With that in mind, I suspect everyone is going to be dealing with significant bouts of poor performance. Oh, well! My tolerance for that sort of thing is pretty high when it comes to early access games—but it's worth noting for those of you who want a smooth ride right out the gate.
Dreamate is aiming for New Arc Line to leave early access late next year, and it's rather reassuring to see that the team isn't attempting to create another 100 hour epic. What's available now will keep you busy for around 10 hours, and it's apparently around a third of the game. With a shorter script to worry about, I'm hoping its writers will have time to punch it up, going a long way to alleviating some of the early access version's shortcomings. What we've got now, though, is an undeniably creative game that makes great use out of its TTRPG-inspired systems.
