Arcadia Fallen is a wonderful game with very well-thought-through underlying messages that are wrapped up in a branching narrative. While its story-heavy personality may not fit the fancy of some folks, its intentions are good enough to entertain most.
I miss the days of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novels. Yes, I know they’re back in some shape, but damn those novels, when they were new, were so much fun to read. They honestly made reading a treat when I was a wee lad. Much like the twist of any M. Night Shyamalan film, building up narrative elements that form one definitive ending based on breadcrumbs left throughout the tale, and choices you make to follow those crumbs is what made those novels a joyous read.
I tell you all of this because I was able to review Arcadia Fallen from developer Galdra Studios over the last few weeks. It’s a helluva ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book in video game form and represents the visual novel well.
Let’s talk it out.
Story drives this ship
Ever since BioWare introduced the powerful perfected concept of branching narratives with Knights of the Old Republic, expectations of getting this narrative storytelling right have always been a picky matter. Knowing that if you choose choice A instead of choice B, and seeing the story shift one way, or another because of your choice makes for a delightful time when a story-driven game makes its way to your home. This is how Arcadia Fallen drives its entire experience.
The story is simple on the surface. You play an alchemist (you customize them – looks/name/all) who works in a shop that is in a boiling pot of a town that despises any sort of magic. The hate towards magic looms through powerful townsfolks, including a snobby rich mine owner that is determined to torture magic folk any chance he can get. On top of this, there are also several murderous figures in town that are waiting to catch magical beings in an alley and let them know how much they hate them, even if it’s a knife to the heart doing the talking. If angry and hateful townsfolk weren’t enough, the world you live in also contains a nefarious underbelly that is filled full of hateful demons. They are appearing everywhere, infecting townsfolks, and getting them to eliminate magic residents. It’s a whole bunch of ugliness everywhere. Your job in the story is to find out where the demons are coming from while avoiding death at the hands of the hateful townspeople. The story hints at solving one means solving the other. Anyway, to solve these mysteries and find a way to ‘reason’ with the local townspeople, you must gather a gaggle of unique beings, including spirits, and do your best to cast your differences aside for the greater good of the community.
The story is the reason you play this game, and the branching narrative is the gameplay design. We’ll get into the latter in the next section.
The underlying message of the game is about fighting bigots and prejudices. The demons and snobby townspeople who hate magic are a strong metaphor that depicts narrow-minded individuals who tend to torture and bug people in real life (yes, outside of this game). The story also encourages people to build a strong community that can overcome hate. It’s a great message that definitely is relevant and strong for times like what we’re dealing with right now. I like this story a lot and support its message. The good folks at Galdra Studios found a good way of crafting their message through meaningful storytelling that is attached to simple gameplay mechanics. It’s a blast playing this adventure.
Again, the story is the best reason to play this title. It is brilliant, meaningful, and it does an admirable job of creating some healthy perspective for those playing it. The gameplay mechanics and small bits of control-based gameplay help to sell it all, but the story is the bulk of the fun.
That gameplay
The crux of what you’re going to be doing here is led by branching choices in the narrative. Your character’s adventure is joined by several characters along the way. How you talk to those characters and treat them equals out to how the story ends up. It’s the main gameplay mechanic. Your adventure can end up complicated along the way, where not a lot of trust is given to you with your decision-making, or your adventure can go the morally good route and do what’s right. The branching narrative is thick in this story. The game makes you feel like you’re in control of all the decisions, which is what a good branching narrative title should do. Along the way to either helping your group or hindering them to an extent, the story is built well enough that it allows you to fall in love with one of the characters in your party if you so choose so. All of this is driven by user-based choices in dialogue and each choice does make an impact.
The secondary gameplay in Arcadia Fallen is crafting and puzzle-solving. The former has you collect elements and create recipes that perform certain tasks (healing, invisibility, curing headaches) using your alchemy skills. It’s nothing incredibly too difficult, as you basically put in three elements at a time, check out symbols related to those elements, and see if you can mix them together in the right order to create a useful recipe/potion. It’s not time-consuming or complicated, so you’ll easily see how this is done early in the game. As someone who is not a huge crafting fan of any title, this was relaxing and fun due to its simplistic nature and handholding. I need a lot of the latter.
The latter, puzzle-solving, is based on the same type of gameplay mechanic, where you mix/match letters to unlock puzzles. The puzzles usually were made up of three wheels in a triangle shape. Each wheel contains three colors and/or symbols. You moved those colors/symbols around to match a pattern that was laid out for you on the other half of the screen. These puzzles weren’t hard, but they did present challenges when they became more complicated as the game continued. The arc of difficulty here is shaped in a nice curve, meaning that you won’t be overwhelmed enough to feel like it hinders the story from continuing. There might be a couple of large puzzle road bumps along the way, but nothing you can’t handle with patience. It is a simple process of gameplay mechanics that adds to the overall narrative through its simplicity and makes sense within the boundaries of the story. In short, it doesn’t get in the way, rather it just adds to the entertainment.
The only hiccup in the above gameplay is that it might be a bit tedious for some players to ingest this much narrative. For me, I enjoyed the story, reading it, and making choices. I felt like I was in control of this story the entire time. I like that because it’s far less linear. Having grown up a huge KOTOR fan and having seen the majesty in Phantasy Star III’s choice system, the large amount of dialogue and story choices weren’t such a burden to me, rather they were driving entertainment. The small breaks of gameplay through crafting potions and puzzle-solving did give me somewhat of a break, but for the most part, I desired to continue the story. Some gamers will be put off by the amount of story, as it is technically unbalanced from other forms of gameplay in Arcadia Fallen, but some people just don’t care for a good story.
This game has a good story to tell.
At the end of the day, this game won’t be for everyone, but the intentions underneath its RPG and ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ personality make for a good time that is replayable.
Conclusion
Arcadia Fallen is a wonderful game with very well-thought-through underlying messages that are wrapped up in a branching narrative. While its story-heavy personality may not fit the fancy of some folks, its intentions are good enough to entertain most.
