Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

"Would you like some Steam Punk with your D&D?"

This is Arcanum, the last gasp of the original creators of the two amazing PC games of the late 90's, Fallout and Fallout 2. When Black Isles went out of business, the three main creators of Fallout formed their own company and made this little gem, which might as well be a sequel to Fallout 2.

The world the game takes place in is an amazing mix of magic and machine, where spell casters and monsters fight along side gun slingers and mechanical spiders. The story starts off with a load of questions left unanswered. Your character is traveling on a zeppelin when it's attacked by crude glider fighters, leading to the death of everyone aboard except you and a beardless dwarf, who with his last words asks you to deliver a ring to an old friend of his and uncover a dark secret. It's not long after this that you encounter a priest who claims that the elfish legends claimed that the reincarnation of their god would appear at that spot, and asks you to accompany him and see if the legends are true. As if that was not confusing enough, you have another encounter after that with a group who are now hunting down the survivors of the crash, and with you being the only one to survive, that kind of lets them focus their attention on you. What comes next is your attempt to find out answers to ever increasing questions, while trying not to get your head handed too you.

For those of you who enjoyed the original two Fallout games for the mechanics and design, you will love this game. Character creation allows for you to choose your race (human, half elf, full elf, half dwarf, half orc, and so forth. The race can give you special abilities or stat bonuses, but usually have trade offs. To match the trait system of Fallout, you can choose between a multitude of traits that will effect you throughout the game, but as usual they all have advantages and disadvantages, so you have to choose wisely. You use the SPECIAL system again for your stats, and your skills are similar to those in earlier games (guns, melee, steal, lock pick, repair) but other then that the game takes on a new path. Each level you get character points, each level gaining you different points (usually more points every few levels). Rather then simply punching in points for your skills and leaving it at that, character points are used for everything. You can beef up your stats, increase your skills (which are now represented as a bar that fills slightly with each point you put into it, so no longer effecting as a percentage) assign magic or mechanical plans. The magical and mechanical points are a trade off. If you have a lot of magic spells, mechanical items will usually malfunction around you and you do worse with skills such as repair which effect your equipment. Having a more mechanically inclined character will allow you to make items based on parts you pick up and let you learn even more recipes to make more items, but in doing so magical equipment (charmed weapons and armor) don't work as well or at all, positive spells like healing fizzle out on you, and potions can botch when used. When you assign points for spells or mechanical skills, your affinity for mechanical or magical tendencies will be tracked on a bar, letting you know which way you are heading, and if you should use more mechanical items or magical, as they will work better if you are aligned with one or the other. As for the two alignments of skills, the choices are large. With magic, there are varied schools that offer many different spells. There are electric spells, nature spells, animal spells, necromancer spells, healing spells, and so on and so forth. To learn the harder spells you have to work you day down through the easier spells first, so while you can learn a little from each school of magic, you have to specialize to get the really strong spells for a particular school. As for the mechanical specials, it's a similar system. There are different types of inventions you can make, electrical, medical, blacksmith, gunsmith, explosives, and more. Like the schools of magic, you have to learn the opening schematics to learn the more advanced plans. Items you make can be as simple as a Molotov cocktail, or as complex as a lightning staff or a mechanical attack sentry, all requiring parts to make the invention but so long as you have the needed parts you can make as many as you like. You can also find plans to make weapons in the game that you cannot learn so as long as you are inclined to those types of inventions you can learn to build even more. What keeps you from learning too much or getting your skills too high early is that spells and schematics and skills have stat caps. For example, you can up your melee skill to attack better with melee weapons, but once you get the skill up to a particular point, you have to have your dexterity up high as well. Once you hit that cap, you have to keep upping your dex until you have enough points in it to put another point in your melee skill. This is how the game makes you balance between skills and stats, as magic spells and schematics also require your stats be higher to learn the more advanced stuff.

The game world is set up similar to Fallout. There is a large overworld map (very nicely designed I must say) that has hidden locations you can find or be directed too by characters. The locations (towns, cities, dungeons, etc.) are set up with a 3/4th Isometric design, and your character moves to wherever you direct him. Actions are dictated by what you click on, letting you investigate, attack, grab, or look at objects in detail. The number of people to interact with is large, and if you are good at stealing that means that you can also grab plenty of stuff from them as well. There are usually lots of trash bins about, simulating real cities and towns, and it's good because you will need the scraps for your inventions if you choose to be one. The game's fighting takes a cue from Fallout, but also offers a little extra. You can fight in turn based combat using action points just as in Fallout but you can also play in real time. Real time fighting is an extreme challenge, but if you can react fast enough, it will probably be a lot more exciting then turn based. Dialog is once more is given to your charisma, intelligence, and speech skill. Having high stats and skills offers more speech options and allows you to talk your way through problems. Also a fun little note is that if you make a bone head character, or get drunk, the game reacts accordingly by making your speech sound very basic, and very funny. There are no more ‘talking heads' instead some characters just having their dialog spoken with voice actors without the CG renditions of the characters. There are plenty of characters to recruit into your party (if your charisma is high enough for you to have a space for them to join), and there are side quests a plenty. There are also special characters to find that will train you. You can train your skills up to become a beginner, intermediate, expert, and master. The first two are easy enough to get, which just makes you less likely to fail, but finding masters is difficult and sometimes requires a quest you need to do before they train you. And as the Fallout games before, you have Karma which goes up and down depending on your actions, so you can choose to be good or evil based on what missions you do and who you kill or don't kill.

The game is not flawless, as most games lack being perfect anyway. The start of the game has you being restrained to a very small alcove area around a town, and there is not much you can do to up your level here. This is a problem because before you can leave town, you have to pass by a gate that is guarded by 2 well armed humans and a large half-orc, also armored. They are extremely difficult to beat with your starting skills and equipment and you will most likely die over and over trying to kill them, usually reloading until you finally get lucky. Some of the areas are large and easy to get lost in, and sometimes it's easy to loose track on what you need to do next, though at least it's improved from the very brief one line descriptions as in Fallout 2. Sometimes the criticals can be a real problem. When you critically miss, and you will a lot, you can lose your weapon, break it, or scar yourself. Dropping a weapon is not a big deal, but the other two problems are. Breaking a weapon can be a huge problem because if you have a one of a kind magic weapon and you break it, you just kicked yourself in the shins right there. And if you scar yourself, you permanently drop your charisma by 1 for each and every scar, so you can scar yourself 3 times and lose 3 points to your charisma. You have plenty of characters to recruit to your party but sometimes they can be a problem to keep. Some characters don't get along well with others, and some will actively attack you if you attack someone they consider themselves positive towards. This can mean that if you are attacked by a dwarf while you have a dwarf in your party who hates fighting other dwarfs, he may leave your party or even join your attacker.

This game was one of the last gasps of the original creators of the Fallout series. It was a great game and a great application of the mechanics in Fallout. What made me not hold this game up to Fallout was that it lacks the amazing setting and feel that Fallout had. Sure, mixing steam punk with magic was a good idea, and the game does a good job of mixing D&D with Victorian settings. It's only a shame that this game did not do very well and did not keep the fledgling company that created it in business for very long. But if you can find a copy of it around today, it's definitely worth a buy.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/08/08

Game Release: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (US, 08/22/01)