Been playing Arcanum, hopefully through to the end for the first time this time. Only begun it before, never got far. The game has a lot of charms, but also a lot of frustrations. Typical Troika, I guess. When it’s firing on all cylinders and the pieces of a quest puzzle happen to click into place it can be great, but oftentimes imbecilic design decisions get in the way of having fun. And it doesn’t help that combat is horrible and the animations are ugly, even for its time.

I’m towards the end of the game now so I’ll try to push through since I’d like to have finished it at least once. I do enjoy the world building, at least parts of it. It’s a little disappointing that the races are derivative sort of boilerplate fantasy Tolkienesque Dwarves and Elves and Halflings etc, but the Victorian era inspired steampunk setting is well executed and the tension and conflict between magic and technology feels fully fleshed out and very grounded in the game world. I also really appreciate the again very Victorian flavored racism towards Orcs and Half-Orcs, including an explicit reference to The Jewish Question.