MONK: "You are not just a normal human, you are the Devil!" MONK: "Help, I have seen the Devil!" Like "Gothic", "Arx" is another role-playing game that was buried by "Morrowind". And "Neverwinter". It was originally planned to be the third game of the "Ultima Underworld" series. When the developer saw EA’s conditions for making a third game, they said: “Maybe we should make our own IP instead?” And so in 2002 they did. Nowadays, the game will run right away, no problem. It can go in a weird slow motion sometimes and I’ve had a few crashes, so we’re gonna fix that. Arx Libertatis is the perfect solution. It fixes bugs and crashes and helps the game run better. As early as the character creator, you can see some definite improvements. There’s no downside to having it. So with that out of the way, let’s start the game. [creepy ambience] [creepy ambience] [soft footsteps] [creepy ambience] I’ll give the short version. Once upon a time, there was a city called Arx. It functioned like any other kingdom, and I assume that they did medieval kingdom things there. Until, one faithful day, the Sun started to go dark. The Sun! So realizing that all life on the surface was about to end, all the races worked together to move the city of Arx underground. There were some abandoned dwarven mines there that they could put it in, and I assume that they didn’t literally push the city there, but instead cleared out the area, but the game actually doesn’t specify. The process took five years, and just about immediately after, the races started having troubles with each other again. Except the Skaven – rat men – they didn’t help anybody. Like the dirty rodents they are, they are already living down there. Speaking of races: there’re also no elves in this world. My mind tells me there never were any, but in my heart I hope they died of a broken heart or other dumb elf stuff. So this is a post-apocalyptic video game. The surface of the world now looks like the surface of the Moon or an asteroid – that’s pretty dire. But through using magic to grow crops and other witchcraft, life carries on. Before you can know more, you’re right in the character creator. For some reason, the default character really reminds me of Tom Cruise. Maybe it’s because of “Legend”. There are four attributes to choose from: Strength, Mental, Dexterity and Constitution. Constitution is kind of useless. These attributes help govern your 9 skills. Each row represents a Thief, Mage and a Warrior respectively. A few of these don’t give you very much. Intuition will highlight hidden buttons and switches, but you can find most on your own. Hmm… Archery is by far the worst skill in the game. It’s not due to the weapon not being effective. I only found two bows in the game. I never fought a single enemy that used a bow, so there were barely any arrows to find either. Ironically, there is no point to the arrows. Honestly, when building a character, even Intuition is fine, just, for the love of God, don’t touch Archery. Alright, let’s get this started. [distorted screaming] Oh… Yeah, I didn’t edit that – that’s the beginning. The beginning is like a few other RPGs combined. You wake up in a prison AND you have amnesia. The escape from prison teaches you most of the mechanics you need to know. This will turn out to be only scratching the surface of what’s possible. It’s also you first introduction to melee combat. And... this is it. To make a stronger attack, you hold click longer to charge it up. And there’s no block feature or parrying. You just have to back away to avoid an attack. You can get better weapons and increase your skills to charge up faster, but there’s no more to it than this. It is possible to recreate a lot of scenes from "Tom and Jerry". That’s the highlight of melee combat. [*badoink*] [laughing track] Now, the most talked about feature in "Arx" is the magic system. By finding and activating Rune Stones, you learn a new magic symbol. These aren’t hotkeyed – you draw the symbols with your mouse. Learning these does take some getting used to. Your timing is as important as the precision. Wrong symbol... There we go! When I said you couldn’t cast through hotkeys that wasn’t entirely true. You can store up to three spells at a time for quick casting, but you do have to draw them first. The magic system is so in-depth that in deserves its own section in a video. For now, let’s talk about the visuals. The art design, especially in the environments, is fantastic. When it comes to designing an environment, having your entire setting be underground is pretty restricting. These ended up being some of the nicest environments I’ve seen in the game from this era. There are a few factors that helped this along, besides technical graphics looking pretty. A lot of thought was put into the practicality of the environments. When normal areas have something as mundane as a kitchen or even a room that just has a toilet in it, it really sells the more fantastical areas. Everyone’s underground, so every so often you’ll see these big air vents around. You see all these little touches everywhere that make the world feel practical somehow. This kind of thing is more common today, but very rare back then. Sure, some things like character models don’t look as good as something like "Splinter Cell" or "Virtua Fighter 4", but the environments really won me over. On the other side of the presentation, the sound design is a mixed bag. Like the visuals, once again, the environments have the best of it. The ambient sound effects are some of the best I’ve heard in a game, period. [ghastly draft blowing through, clicking and cracking is coming from different directions, abrupt scream is heard in the distance] [footsteps interrupted by sudden sound from behind] [*ribbit*] [*ribbit*] [weird, lisping murmur and hasty footsteps] You always wonder when an ambush is coming. Even the character movement sounds will change depending on what kind of armor they are wearing. [only footsteps are heard] [footsteps and ringing of chainmail] [footsteps and clanking of armor plates] Once again, the atmosphere excels. But then you have the voice acting. NPC: "To Lunshire! To our good King!" The game was constantly reminding me of "Deus Ex", and it wasn’t just the gameplay – it was the voice acting. NPC 1: "I eat chicken!"
NPC 2: "I spill my drink…" There’s some stellar voice acting work but the random NPCs are so strange. There’s a kind of charm to all of it. NPC1: "Sleep well guys, we’re gonna need it." NPC2: Thanks, good night." NPC3: "G’night."
NPC4: "Yeah... Yeah, good night…" [some more banter ending in snoring] GOBLIN: "OPEN GA-ATES, LET DISGUSTING HUMAN I-IN!" Strangely enough, the main character sounds like he couldn’t give a damn what’s happening. AM SHEGAR: "I think it is time now that we helped each other…" ORK: "Yes!" WOMAN: "…and she never came back to the stall." WOMAN: "Nobody has seen her, and the guards are far too busy dealing with the Ylside attacks to do anything about it…" AM SHEGAR: "I will discover what has happened to you little girl." WOMAN: "Oh, thank you, thank you!" I wondered why the side characters had such good direction, but the main character seemed so off. Believe it or not, this isn’t something I’m gonna talk about until spoilers, because it’s relevant to the story. That sure caught me off guard. We’ll deal with it later. The music is nearly non-existent. The soundtrack (if you can call it that) is built into the background ambient sounds. It does set the mood well, and when the ethereal music creeps in from time to time, it sticks out more. However, it’s nothing I’d call memorable. There’s not even an audio slider for music – just ambience. That won’t stop all of it. [plays lute] [plays lute harder] [*broomk*] The gameplay in "Arx" is impressive for just how much you can do with it. Out of combat, you can pick locks, steal items and talk to people, like you’d expect in many RPGs, but it goes beyond that. You can repair your items at anvils. Create new potions or ingredients using a mortar and pestle. The game has a hunger system. You could go fishing, grab your catch, then throw it into a fire where it will cook for you. Any raw meat you harvest from an enemy can also be cooked. You can fill a bottle with water, get some flour, then combine them together to make bread dough. You can then put it by the fire and watch the dough rise in real time when you cook it. That’s kind of insane. If you feed a dog some meat, he’ll start following you around. If you see some mice scurrying around – throw some cheese on the ground. "Arx" is full of tiny details like this. What makes it stronger is that it doesn’t ignore these tiny mechanics. If anything, mastering them could open up easier ways of approaching a situation. There’s one part of the game where you’re having goblin issues. Now, you could run in and kill all of them, but they’re not all tiny goblins. Some of these are... NBA goblins. So you could work at a different approach. If you do some sleuthing, you’ll find out that goblin king is a bit of a hermit and he just stays in his room eating cakes all day. Do some more sleuthing, and you’ll find out that the king is allergic to wine. So you can go into the kitchen and spike his cake mix, so that the cook is unknowingly poisoning the king. This doesn’t kill him, but it does obliterate his intestines, so he has to run off to the bathroom. Then, when he’s sitting on the crapper, you can have your impromptu audience with the King. You’d find something like this more often in a point-and-click adventure game, but no, it’s a role-playing game. You can bash doors open. Get a pickaxe, mine some gems and sell them. Go gamble your fortune away or maybe win a lot. The troll mines are on strike and not profitable? Go buy the shares, they’re low. Go solve the problem. Now sell the shares for high. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I were to keep replaying this game, I’d find something new every time. The problem comes from the first time you play. This game does not hold your hand AT ALL. Very rarely the map will be marked. Progressing a mission might be talking to a single NPC to get moving. You might have no idea you need to talk to somebody, you’ll just wander around. This is not at all something exclusive to "Arx". A lot of adventure and role-playing games in the 90s were like this. The idea is that you’ll keep exploring the world and doing side quests and these could be hard to find also. To achieve the good ending, you need to do some exploring. Doing it is not part of the main quest. So trying to blitz exclusively through the main quest isn’t recommended. You’re missing some of the more interesting moments, equipment and XP. [appalling flute sounds] Please stop. So what about magic? Well you can learn about 40 spells in the game, and it’s not counting all the hidden ones – there’s at least over 50. Not all spells are exclusively for combat, so here are just a few things you can do with it: enchant weapons, cause paralysis, levitate, reach stuff with telekinesis, turn invisible, raise the dead, treat yourself, super speed, activate a teleport portal, turn off a force field, use magic to get rid of your hunger. America needs this right now, doesn’t it? Summon lightning butterflies that I think are damaging them. Make your game textures look blurry like "Ultima Underworld"… Wait, what? Summon a chaos demon from beyond our world that hates all life. Unfortunately “all life” includes you. There’s a fix for that. Use the “Control Demon” spell so it gets rid of rats for you. All of this begs the question: why would you not focus on magic? Well, you should. Magic and melee isn’t just the best way to go, it’s basically the only way to go. But if you don’t have spells prepared, casting in combat can be tricky. You can mess up a rune needed for you spell, or you could just run out of mana. If you don’t have potions to chug, then you better have a backup weapon. When you’re good at you spells, there’s nothing like it. GOBLIN: "Here is human!" [*ribbit*] [*baboosh*] GOBLIN: "What's that? Here is human!" [*wazoosh*] "AHH!" [*ba-bok-pok-pok-pok*] The game has a lot of runes, and, unfortunately, some are very similar. From time to time, the game fails to detect them properly. I swear, it changes, based on either what room you’re in or what’s in front of you Here’s an example. I wanna cast Spacium – that big “C” up there. I’m trying, but it’s just not happening, so I look back at the spell book. It has a demo of the shape, but that looks less like a “C” to me. It’s an unfinished rectangle with a shorter bottom side. The rune itself is a big “C”. If we look at the "Create Field" spell, we can see Spacium is in a list for it. That symbol though looks like a nearly complete box. So which is it? This symbol, that symbol, or the other symbol? You would think the game would give some leeway and try to figure out the exact spell you’re making, and it does. But sometimes it just flat-out starts detecting the wrong rune, and it’s not even close. All right, let’s try drawing the Taar symbol that looks like a “Z”. It keeps detecting Aam which is a horizontal line. This one keeps thinking it’s a horizontal line going the other way. Ugh... This game was made in a lower resolution, so I can try that. Now it’s seeing a vertical line going down. This is hell. How about the lowest possible? At this rate, I’m just making it as wild as I can, but it’s still detecting straight lines. I tried the game without the mod, in all resolutions, I tried capping the frame rate... The mod is actually supposed to improve the spell detection and, yeah – the native game was even worse at it. What made it so maddening is that this was only happening sometimes. It usually worked great, but in a few areas it was like I’d lost my mojo. Eventually, I found a solution – the 1.2 dev build of the mod. It has a few more fixes and some options like HUD scaling, but here’s the important part: the option for alternate rune recognition. They should probably rename that to “better recognition”, because it worked perfectly. The times when something just didn’t cast were probably the most frustrating in the game and they could be avoided. Well, there was that one puzzle... So the magic system is great, but when it doesn’t work, you get flashbacks to using bad motion controls. I don’t own a VR headset or anything like that, but a system like this in VR working well could be amazing. As for "Arx", I do wish you could store more spells at a time and maybe not have the hotkeys change when you use one, but other than that it’s great. You can be a heroic wizard and save all these goblin prisoners… Oh shit! I’m so sorry, everyone, I didn’t think we would see this today. Really, I’m so sor… Hey check it out, if you click on him the body spins around! He’s dead! [laughing track] [Sein...] With everything else out of the way, that leaves us with the story. I wouldn’t call it bad, but it is generic. The main quest is about stopping an evil god and his followers. I’ve seen this play out a few times. I do find the hero’s origin story to be pretty genius. If you don’t want spoilers, skip to here: Alright then. The hero was sent by a realm known as The Noden. It’s a metaphysical Heaven/Interpol, which watches over the Universe and make sure there’s a balance between gods and mortals. That’s why Am Shegar appears screaming and on fire in the beginning of the game. You master is this space lizard, who keeps reminding me of Keith David for some reason. He explains why they sent you the way you are to save the world. They used to send agents with near godlike powers to places in trouble. As it turned out, sending in a heavily-armed Christ figure was bad for local stability. They were essentially dropping Gandalf somewhere and saying: “go crazy, no limits”. So they sent their agents in memory-wiped. They did have an ability to learn very quickly and become powerful very quickly. Do you see what they’ve done? They made leveling up part of the narrative. That’s why you go from being a caveman to a demigod so quickly. It was all planned out. It’s also why Tom Cruise sounds dead inside, but keeps wanting to help. He’s detached from the world, because he’s not FROM the world. The good and bad endings are just about some politics between snake people and the human kingdom. The ultimate ending doesn’t change and, after all, everybody is still underground. You’re not even allowed to stay after you beat the Big Bad. You’re so powerful that you have to go home. But they do live you with a glimmer of hope for the world. They show that there are some lights on the surface. Someone or something out there has found a way to survive above ground. Then comes the ultimate reveal. The Sun didn’t burn out – it was being blocked by the dust from a passing asteroid field. I got to admit – I didn’t see that coming. This guy didn’t expect me to close the door on him. Close the door on him… "Arx" is a truly excellent game, but it’s also a flawed one. If the team had more time to work on it, it could’ve shined even brighter. Aspects like melee combat could have been improved and ranged combat could have been... properly added. The game would have benefited by having dialogue options or even some branching missions. Finally, a few areas could have been fleshed out more. It was implied that Ratmen had an agenda, but when you finally go through their area, you just go through it once, and they seem to have no purpose in the grander story. They also could have made some stuff less cryptic. It’s still a fascinating game. If the magic system sounds interesting to you, check it out. Or if you like interesting environments, or just messing around. I can think of few games where you could kill everyone and still beat the story. Or eat so much garlic that talking to women makes them call for the guards, because you smell so bad. If you’re more into melee combat, just play "Dark Messiah". Thanks for watching! I’ll see you in the next video when things get a little more Lovecraftian. Halloween is coming up! Also, thanks to all the backers who were waiting on me during my content drought. It’s been busy. When I made the call for credit questions, most people were telling me not to die in a hurricane. So for everyone out of the loop - here’s what’s been happening and here’s what’s coming next. The moving process went alright, there were some delays and, as usual, some things went wrong, but I was finally all settled and ready to get back to work in mid-September. Unfortunately, I was now in the path of hurricane Florence, which was scaring the city to death. They were emailing me, telling me they are gonna shut down power for the grid and all these other preventative measures. It wasn’t that bad here, but I was without power off and on, so I was pretty delayed. Right now I’m getting back into the swing of things, so I should get into a healthy upload schedule again. I’m planning on mainly doing game reviews until the end of the year, no mod reviews yet. And the “How to make a review video” will most likely be in January. I had a much larger gap between videos than I thought I would, so I just wanna focus on the regular stuff for now. I’m also still playing catch-up with a lot of emails, so, if I hadn’t gotten back to you yet, I likely will sometime over this weekend. Alright, that’s all, for now. Stay safe out there.
I love Mandaloregaming's reviews. He goes into depth of each one and actually feels like he has played each game he is reviewing thoroughly
Woah, the magic system and the way you interact with the world sound ahead of their time. I really love Mandalore for shedding light on some pretty interesting older games like this one. The late 90s/early 00s seems to be loaded with obscure titles that were pretty damn ambitious for what the technology of the time allowed.
Ludo Lense also had a great retrospective of the same game.
When he was talking about magic and mentioned this- OrbusVR. THe mage class works exactly like this. You cast spells by drawing them real time while fighting. It's pretty cool actually.
In Prey (2017) there's a side-quest involving some NPCs playing a pen and paper RPG. The setting they used was the same as Arx Fatalis, along with having to draw their own magic runes. Nice little detail and a nod to their first game.
For anyone interested in actually playing this game, make sure to download Arx Libertatis like he said in the review. It's an open source engine for it with widescreen and fov support, while also being a bit less buggy. It's a mandatory download.
And for anyone who is interested in (an arguably better) game that's not only similar but what Arx was inspired by, check out Ultima Underworld (and get munt, the mt32 sound emulator). It's a bit tougher to get into, but probably one of the best games of all time IMO. An absolute masterpiece which is better than Arx not because Arx is bad (It's great, go play it) but because Ultima Underworld just can't be topped.
Judging by that end comment, can we expect a Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth review come Halloween?
I think I remember hearing about this game on X-Play (might have even still been Extended Play) and then like, 7+ years later picking it up. It's a super fun little RPG, and as mentioned, the magic casting is a really neat system.
Genuinely one of my favourite games of all time but fuck me can you ruin your experience without realising it. Stealth has very limited applications, fireballs are OP as fuck and you should try and not rely on them and the last encounter is aggravating if you don't have the optimal build (mage/fighter)