Arco flips the script on the Western genre and turn-based combat

The four developers behind Arco set out to make something different, and they’ve certainly made an audacious impression. Arco combines the narrative heft and emotional drama of the best classic JRPGs, a unique take on turn-based shootouts, and a smart reinvention of the Western genre that could win a rare smirk of approval from Clint Eastwood himself. It's no wonder this tactical RPG has been dubbed one of the year’s best indie titles.

Director Franek Nowotniak says Arco feels so refreshingly different because they deliberately went in blind. “For better or worse, I intentionally avoided interacting with any video games that seemed like they could influence Arco a lot. I don’t know if it was a good practice, but it wasn’t a terrible one since people seem to perceive the game as a new thing!”
 

Pixel landscaping

When you think Western, you think landscapes. Whether you’re picturing John Ford’s favorite Arizona red-sand deserts and Monument Valley canyons or remembering the Spaghetti Westerns shot all over the Tabernas Desert in the Spanish province of Almeria, the natural world looms large in the memory of movie lovers just as much as the genre’s frantic shootouts, sordid bar-brawls and cowboy trash talk.

Arco evokes that same sense of wonder. Touches of magical realism distinguish Arco from its predecessors—the game includes six-legged cattle and adorable axolotl tribes, as cute as any of Final Fantasy’s Moogles. Its landscapes are also unique, drawing from Central American and even African influences.

But in comparison to their surroundings, the game’s four vengeful llama-riding protagonists are tiny. You’ll come to know every detail of their lives and the grievances that drive them, but they're nevertheless swallowed up by the exquisite pixel-art vistas that dominate every frame.

Nowotniak, an experienced environment artist, says the goal was always to make players feel that imposing, diminutive feeling as they wandered these expansive vistas, where the navigable space is often a fraction of the miles seen on-screen. “The giant size difference between characters and the environment was there from the first mockups of the journey. It was always meant to make the player feel small in the scale of the universe.”

This demands a mindset shift from players, typically used to cameras centered on their character at all times. In Arco, you're often a smudge of delicately arranged pixels exploring an unmoving and uncaring diorama. “I’m used to tiny characters enough so that they’re very readable to me,” says Nowotniak, “but I can see six pixel sheep being confusing to some players!”
 

Flipping the perspective

For all its merits and untold influence, the Western has struggled to find a new lease on life in the modern era. That said, the genre still has devotees who hope for it to transcend its legacy as a fondly regarded but outdated relic.

“I think I was on a weeks-long streak of watching Westerns at the time Arco’s development began,” says Nowotniak. “Westerns are great, and I love them, but they do get a bit repetitive. I think there’s a lot of room for Westerns that challenge the genre more. Flipping the perspective to present a story of indigenous people seemed like a simple but significant and effective twist on the genre.”

You’re no gun-toting cowboy here. Arco is a Mesoamerican fantasy about indigenous characters taking revenge against interlopers. Your ranged weapon of choice is a traditional bow, not a revolver, when fighting off settlers and bandits and (especially) the resource-hungry Red Company.

Arco spends time and effort grounding players in the threatened everyday life of its various indigenous cultures. As Teco, you'll experience the nomadic Iyo pilgrimage to the Sacred Tree, while Itzae's story starts with fulfilling her duties to the Kanek village. Later, the story moves on to settlements and grand capitals based on Aztec, Mayan, and other indigenous cultures. Arco's characters are driven by personal vengeance, yes, but players also understand exactly what these characters lost and can never get back.

Antonio “Fáyer” Uribe, who provided programming support on Arco, explains more about the team's approach. “Since I joined this has been an important thing in my mind. The game is fiction and is not meant to be representative of real life, but it does draw inspiration from reality. It was important for us that it was done in a respectful way.”

Focusing on the lifestyles, cultures, folklore and cuisine—as well as the distinctive biomes and architecture—of Central and South America was important, and an effective way to distinguish Arco's characters from the Western's stereotypical male heroes of European descent.
 

Bullet time in the face of bullet hell

Arco's turn-based battles are brisk, brutal, and high-stakes affairs where every decision matters. Your moves and your enemies’ are executed simultaneously. It’s on you to weave a safe path through a mass of projectiles tearing across the screen, and either evade the strikes of melee enemies or beat them to the punch with an interrupt attack.

Encounters are often challenging. They share the puzzle-like nature of Into the Breach, minus its neat grid arrangements that restrict your choices and enemy’s reactions into orderly pre-set channels. Never more powerful, usually outnumbered, you have one main advantage—being able to see your opponent’s moves in advance and plan accordingly.

Arco turns bullet hell into bullet time, freezing a hailstorm of bullets in place at the end of each turn, leaping frogs and charging insects stopped in mid-air. This moment to think is where you get the upper hand. And if that’s not enough, you can instantly restart any encounter, respec your character for another go, or even fall back entirely.

Though the team spent years refining Arco's combat, Nowotniak still thinks there’s a price paid when reinventing genre conventions. “The fact that it’s not taking place on a grid clashes with a turn-based system that is expected to be deterministic. […] It’s something that can be learned, but the player doesn’t expect to have to learn it. It makes Arco more unique and interesting, but at a cost.”

And Arco is all about costs, whether that’s the cost of traumatic events, the action points per combat move, the lives and cultures threatened by settlers, or the cost of your own decisions—which manifest in Arco's Guilt mechanic. At first, you think you have all the time in the world to figure out Arco's turn-based combat…and then ghosts appear, moving in real-time, muddying your decision making and forcing you into rushed actions.

These ghosts may be a literal-minded case of your past actions coming back to haunt you, but this is no mere morality system. You may choose to be cruel, you may fall into the wrong decision by bad luck, or you can simply violate the tenets of your character’s traditions by sheer ignorance. Bad things happen, whether you like it or not, in the callous world of a Western whose hardships and cruelties compete with kinder impulses.

“We didn’t want a 'morality' system that felt like a projection of our modern morals on this ancient fantasy world," Fáyer says. "We decided to name it Guilt because it allowed us to shape it in relation to the character that you were playing—not our views or the player’s.”

That faithfulness to its characters and setting is what elevates Arco far beyond a unique-but-demanding tactics game, or a rousing 16-bit-styled odyssey through Central America. Arco is just as hauntingly memorable as its landscapes.

Arco is out now on the Epic Games Store.