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

When the trailer for steampunk RPG New Arc Line dropped in April, I was immediately captivated by the premise. To my shame, I never got around to the social tensions and world of magic and technology of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. A newer, shinier trip to a similar environment sounded like just the ticket. After spending a few hours with the preview build, I have at least one very positive news to share: I’m definitely going to play Arcanum now, because despite some appealing environments and potentially interesting social systems, New Arc Line just doesn’t it’s not for me.

If you missed that trailer, the setup here is that you’re an immigrant traveling to New Arc – a supposedly shining beacon of progress that’s rotten to the core with corruption, danger, and prejudice. The caravan opened with a vignette showing an elf mother escaping from captivity with her sick child, but my own entrance into the city was a lot less fraught. A customs officer in a bobby hat warned me about magic (magic that I would later openly cast onto the streets without reprisal – Athkatla, I miss you every day). Then he told me how nice he thought elves were, and sent me on my merry way. My first quest: find my suitcase. I like a bit of baggage based searching, I do that too.

But first: character creation. The preview build includes two species (elf and human) and two classes: “diesel engineer” or, uh, “voodoo shaman.” I went with the second one because I liked the jacket, chose eleven, and proceeded to create the character I always do when I’m out of better ideas: Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie with ridiculous conversation stats. I chose the “outsider” trait because of stronger magic and because the wording – “your debts in this world grow faster” – was suitably mysterious. You assign starting points to stats (constitution, strength, etc.) and skills, which are the more nuanced, interesting aspects, like survival and observation. I started working hard on charm until I noticed a skill called “spot.” The curse of the hacking critic truly runs deep.

Before you enter New Arc, there’s a little rice krispies in the media. Eleven Bowie finds himself in a hospital gown in a crumbling city, staggering from a dragon attack, and you have to stagger out very slowly. Remember when Phantom Pain did this and it was a bit annoying but ultimately effective because it’s a third-person action game where you get a real sense of your character’s morbid physicality? If you take away that physicality, all you’re left with is boredom, I’m afraid. Plows slog. At least the destroyed city is striking; immediately depicting the divide between nature and industry, all littered with massive coggery and luminous reptile-skinned flora. Unfortunately, I can’t fully appreciate it, because the camera keeps getting caught on something.

There are a few introductory skill tests as you make your way through the wreckage. A dwarf plunged to his death when I lost my grip on the stretcher he was hanging on, a couple jumped on it their deaths when I failed to convince them that life was worth living, a man impaled bled to death when I failed to find help for him – tragic events of that nature. At one point I was attacked by a boy who accused me of causing the current chaos, and this came up again in another conversation. Ah, so this is all my fault? Interesting.

I eventually stumble my way to safety, and it involves a scene between my character and a judge. I’m being questioned for possession of agitprop. This scene captures the political situation of the world quite well, although some of the writing and subsequent choices are less on the nose than on the nostrils: “Is it fair to treat someone badly just because they are different? ?” reads one option. Should we really kick a homeless orphan in the face just because the system considers him a scrappy no-coin?

I’m going to skip ahead here, because the writing is truly the soul of any good CRPG, and this is where New Arc Line failed to grab me the most. The prose itself is quite good! I whipped a bystander into alertness at one point, and the description of how his saliva soothed the burn on my cheek from the cigarette he’d also spit at me was nicely vivid. There are some cute touches too: “My sniffle feels like a plate of mashed tater tots.”

The problem for me was in the character archetypes. The aforementioned mash nose is a beefy bruiser type who joins your party early, and there’s really nothing wrong with him. He’s big and likes to hit people and snort magic cocaine and probably pronounces ‘thug’ as ‘tug’ and that’s about it. To gain entry into a new territory, I have to endear myself to a theater company, and the playwright is every lazy, vaguely homophobic trope of an overly precious, flamboyant, and tired artist that you could fit on a plate of mashed potatoes. I have to show his actors his real script after they’re given an edited version full of syndicate propaganda, and he shakily refers to the syndicate leader as “a loser who’s never even had a manicure.” I feel like I heard every line before it came out of his mouth.

That quest is interesting by the way. As the play progresses, I am given a series of choices between the lines and must identify the original script from the syndicated propaganda. It’s certainly not too damning, but I appreciate what it says about the stranglehold the syndicates have on the arts in this world. Not something I’ve experienced before, if bad memory serves me.

Let’s rewind for a moment. Before I meet the playwright, I have to find my suitcase with the help of my bruiser buddy. Along the way I discover a fun, risky pickpocketing mini-game, and also loot a few suitcases right next to their owners, without any reaction. Occasionally the game will automatically make perception checks. I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing exactly, but I think it’s related to the loot. I follow an objective marker to where my suitcase should be, some rodents of unusual size jump out of a box and it’s time for a fight.

Tradition dictates that a description of combat gets its own paragraph, but if you’ve played a turn-based battle with action points before, that’s actually not necessary. A little twist here is that everyone gets an armor bar above their health that automatically regenerates each turn. I can see this possibly becoming interesting down the road, perhaps offering the chance to spec aggro tank characters, or forcing you to maintain a certain level of aggression to avoid losing momentum. As for these early combat encounters, though, all they do is make them drag out an era – especially noticeable since you have so few options so early.

And that was ultimately why I quit the preview build instead of poking around for secrets and sidequests as I had originally planned. I got into a fight with a few tech zombies, there were about five of them, and it took me several turns to take them all down. I was already soured by the aforementioned writing problems and because I had picked up a very elaborate hammer just before the carnival barker perform the hammer game and he said absolutely nothing to me. The grind of battle was the last straw. The game will launch soon enough in early access anyway, so you won’t have to wait too long to play for yourself. Early access is a smart move, and I think the bones are there for a decent CRPG in a potentially interesting setting. Me? Arcanum, here I come.