Arco review

“Bite-size” is one of those terms that gets a bad rap. This may be because it conjures memories of cramming for GCSEs with the help of the Beeb, or because, when deployed in the world of cuisine, it often translates to: “slightly less than you paid for.” But in games, bite-size can be a wonderful size. WarioWare is bite-sized: the entire history of interaction delivered in four-second gulps. Into the Breach is bite-sized: a dizzying well of strategy that you can dip into in the time it takes to send an email.

And Arco? Arco is bite-sized. It takes this stuff seriously. It’s bite-sized in the art, in which tiny pixelated heroes and villains can easily disappear behind a typical mouse pointer. It’s there in the way the narrative of this wonderfully weird Western unfolds, in bursts of chewy, iMessage scrolling. And it’s there in the combat, which pitches you right into the middle of complex dust-ups that can obligingly burn themselves out in just a handful of terms. This is the Into the Breach take on bite-size games, and it rules.

This is particularly cheering since Arco’s early review code was rather unstable. Having now had a chance to properly engage with the game on PC as well as Switch, it’s a happy thing to report that you can dive in without worries of crashing. And what a game you’ll be diving into.

Arco tells three dovetailing stories of a Latin America-inspired landscape under attack from money-grabbing invaders. You move around beautiful rugged maps, chatting to people, finding unexpected items, going on micro-side-quests and getting into battles. Its story-telling is swift and compact but very rich, building on sorrow and revenge in elegant ways.

Battling is where it’s at, though. Arco uses a simultaneous turn-based system, which means you and your enemies make your moves in private and then both unfold at the same time. There’s no grid, but placement is still key. You extend an arrow out from your characters telling them where to move or where to aim their attacks. Enemy attacks are well-signposted, so there’s as much fun in working out the rhythm of each encounter – particularly when to stay still and recoup mana – as there is to deploying the specials each character can unlock with XP, or making sure that you dart in to strike – or teleport, in certain circumstances – and then beat it back to the periphery again.

Throw in environmental hazards and enemies who massively out-match you in the firepower department, and the short span of each battle starts to make sense. You don’t want these things to go on for fifteen minutes, which probably explains why the bosses aren’t the highlights. Instead, you want, well, the bite-sized approach: five minutes to try out a new strategy and either succeed and grab the XP, or reload and try something different.

All lovely, but there’s the contrast here that marks out the truly thoughtful work of art. Arco’s tiny people, and their tiny battles, stir huge emotions as the story unfolds, and their stories play out across a massive backdrop that relies on the small scale of the characters to make its mountains, mesas and forests tower the way they do. The land is in danger, and the land is, in its own way, completely overwhelming. So good, then, that you can take all of this at your own pace, and in your own time.

Arco review code was provided by Panic