Pixel art adventure Arco's really good fun – but it's also very buggy at the moment

I’ve been playing Arco on and off for the last few weeks on Switch and PC. I’m loving it – I think Arco’s pretty wonderful. But the builds I’ve been playing on are also rather buggy, and I haven’t been able to get to the end, either because of show-stopper bugs or random crashes.

ArcoPublisher: PanicDeveloper: Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki, FayerPlatform: Played on PC and SwitchAvailability: Out on 15th August on PC (Steam, Epic) and Switch.

What we’re going to do in this case is hold back the review until next week, when I’m able to play retail code and know how the final thing runs. Until then, I wanted to give you a brief taste of what this game is like and why I think tactics fans should be excited. Hopefully next week we’ll find that the final code is a lot more stable.

I’m going to focus pretty tightly on the combat today, which is an absolute gem. Just to set the scene, though, Arco’s a Western story of indigenous people and greedy colonisers, and it plays out across a number of acts with the player shifting between different roles in each act. You take on missions and move from one area to another, helping people, fighting, and generally learning the story of this place.

The aesthetic is beautiful ragged pixelart with tiny characters and vast horizons, and a lot of the beats of the story unfold a bit like they do in something like FTL. You’ll chat with someone and you’ll get a kind of WhatsApp stream of what’s said. You’ll see something glinting in the underbrush and you’ll be asked if you want to risk reaching for it. Maybe it’s a necklace, maybe you get bitten by a snake. Here’s a bridge – do you want to fish? Do you have any bait? This is how Arco unfolds.

And then there’s combat. Combat in Arco is genuinely brilliant, I think, even if it took a while for it to fully click. It’s one of those games, like Frozen Synapse, where both sides plan their moves and then you execute them at once, so as much as you’re trying to defeat your foe you’re trying to counter what they haven’t done yet. Fights generally pitch you against a group of enemies, and hovering over each enemy shows what they’re going to do next. Are they going to move or attack or even just wait?