Arx Fatalis is not a perfect game. At its worst, its a frustration simulator with its unwieldy UI, extremely limited combat, and unorthodox magic system.

At its best, this game feels like a RPG missing link between the 90's and the 2000's. While it retains some of the adventure/puzzle solving lineage from games like Ultima and Baldur's Gate, its magic system and world design feels ahead of its time compared to some of Arx's contemporaries like Morrowind or Fallout. It really has more in common with Deus Ex and Thief than anything else.

While the magic gesture system takes a long to get used to, magic's utility has so much potential within a 3D space in a 1st person view. This wouldn't be that fun on its own, but Arx provides a fascinating answer with its giant dungeon world.

Arkane asks themselves: What would a whole world fit into the Mines of Moria be like? You get the giant and singular puzzle box that is Arx Fatalis.

Better than most shit that's been released in the last 10 years.

A game can simply be cool and funny and weird.

MEGA MEGA MEGA

I keep trying to write this review but I am never sure how to articulate the words to express how magical Arx Fatalis feels to explore.

This is not a game I appreciated immediately, nor is it something I understood the potency of 15 hours in. But days after completing Arx Fatalis, I cannot stop thinking about every floor of this sprawling, claustrophobic labyrinth.

It is Arkane Studios' most freeing immersive sim and has the only magic system in this medium that actually made me feel like a wizard. It is full of little issues but I cannot recommend it enough.

Arx Fatalis is the first game from now-famous Arkane Studios, most known these days for their immersive sims Dishonored and Deathloop. Unlike the vast majority of their output though, Arx isn't an immersive sim. Kinda.

It's a WRPG most obviously, with all the morrowindy trappings you'd assume, but without the big large open world. Instead, you have a series of caverns set on different floors, and you're free to roam around them (in fact, you'll need to go back and forth through them fairly often. Honestly, what comes immediately to mind is System Shock, which, given what the studio would go on to do, kinda makes sense.

Honestly this game feels like a WRPG Imsim hybrid a lot of the time, and that's kind of where some awkwardness tends to come in? Like the way you interact with people and towns and all that feels very WRPG, as does the setting and plot, but the reality of gameplay is more about figuring cryptic puzzles out and sneaking or fighting your way through baddies.

It's all a bit clunky, but that's no big issue really. The spell system is the only one that pushes that a bit far (you have to draw the runes in your spells, and it can be finicky) but you can pre-cast a few spells for quick use). Otherwise it's pretty standard fare for early 2000s imsim/wrpg interface design, which is to say, a bit too complex for its own good.

The atmosphere is pretty top notch, which is helped by the fact that the whole game is set underground. It's all dark and the ambient noises and occasional soundtrack blurbs are turned way up. You feel like you'll never quite escape the cold, claustrophobic caves before they come tumbling down on your head, burying this whole civilization and all their mythology.

What ended up pushing me off the game the most is how cryptic it can be. It's a world full of secret passages and hidden notes and it feels nicely lived in and real, but also tends to turn into pixel-hunting essentially. Once you're on your 3rd or 4th round through a dungeon looking for whatever hidden path you missed, for the 3rd time in the game, it just starts to feel kinda eh. On top of that, the combat doesn't have a whole lot of feedback, turning a minorly awkward system into the feeling of punching brick walls until they fall down. None of it is a death knell, especially with atmosphere like this, but it started to feel like I was forcing myself to boot the game up just to get through it, and that's usually how I know I should drop something.

This seems like a really cool game, with loads of atmosphere and charm, but progression is just too cryptic for me right now, and I’m feeling the combat get monotonous. An interesting and charming game, but maybe not much more

Arx Fatalis is very interesting as a proto-immersive sim. The gameplay and world-building are very ambitious, though it doesn't succeed in every aspect.

The world of Arx is atmospheric and evocative. You enter a fairly generic Tolkien inspired world, made more interesting by the fact that civilization has retreated beneath the earth to escape the cold, sunless, surface of their world. The world isn't large, but hints at people that travel between settlements and the caverns you explore are packed with different groups of people with different goals and levels of hostility.
The story is pretty generic, but it has some cool aspects. Early in the game you find out you are a sort of trans-dimensional god assassin, sent to kill the god of destruction before he kills everyone, which is pretty sick. This basically just boils down to being the "Chosen One" but you are characterized as sort of an asshole, which is entertaining. There are quite a few optional quests and optional ways to handle the main quest that make it feel like you are a part of a world that is really reacting to your presence.

Arx Fatalis has the glimmers of a systems heavy immersive sim, but outside of a few areas, it is fairly limited. There is a metal crafting system that can be used to make and enchant weapons, there are fairly robust cooking and alchemy systems, and magic in the game is extremely in-depth and interesting. You don't interact with any of these through menus, which is impressive, if fiddly. For instance, to bake bread you combine flour and water in the world, bring the dough to a flame, and let it cook. Unfortunately, most of the problems in the game are solved with combat, so most of these systems end up feeling a bit irrelevant. For the most part, they feel like they were added because they seem cool, not because they elevate the gameplay.
The magic is really the focus here. The system consists of a series of runes you draw with your mouse. If you draw the right combination, a spell is cast -- Increase + Health heals your hitpoints, for instance. For the most part these are intuitive and make sense, letting you infer spells the game doesn't tell you about -- Decrease + Health causes a damage field around you. Arx Fatalis is definitely balanced around this system though, so even though the game implies you could be a rogue or warrior archetype, it is prohibitively difficult without understanding the magic system.

Combat is standard first person fare that can feel pretty bad. There is a simple system to charge your attacks for more damage, but fighting boils down to shuffling around trying to out-range your opponents. It feels like you are intended to use magic to make things more interesting, though the real-time drawing is pretty unwieldy.
About 75% of the way through the game there is a pretty extreme difficulty spike, with a specific type of enemy that annihilates you unless you find a way around it with magic, which means that your playstyle choices are extremely undermined.

I had a really good time with Arx Fatalis and it is an awesome historic piece to see where Arkane started. You definitely have to put up with quite a bit of early PC game jank, but there is a lot of cool stuff to get out of this if you give it a chance.

This game does a tons of cool shit and even impresses almost 20 years later. Things like 3d models seamlessly transitioning with a 2d grid menu is still a great qol feature that is unique to this game as far as I know. The setting and lore are extremely unique, and fascinating as well. It does a good job of making the player take initiative and explore by not really giving them set directions on where to go on some parts which could be a weakness this game has, as well as the combat which is good but if you create a warrior build which is what I did, than it gets really grating moving back wards and hitting the guy with a sword the entire game, and the Ylsides can burn in hell.