Arco on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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A Mesoamerican fantasy RPG that blends turn-based and real-time combat. Explore the world through three handcrafted stories forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge.
Arco is a rpg, turn-based strategy and action-adventure game
developed by Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki and Fáyer
and published by Panic.
Released on August 15th 2024 is available on Windows and MacOS
in 7 languages: English, German, Japanese, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish - Latin America.
It has received 1,504 reviews of which 1,456 were positive and 48 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.2 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 17.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Arco into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: i3 2GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- VR Support: no
- Additional Notes: OpenGL 3.2
MacOS
- OS: macOS 11 Big Sur or newer
- Processor: Apple M1 or 64-bit Intel
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Integrated Graphics
- Storage: 1 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This game is amazing, maybe the most underrated game I've come across The turn based gameplay is satisfying and fun - you are always looking forward to getting more and more exp so that you can move along in the skill tree to advance your characters skillset The story is fantastic - it never overstays its welcome and moves along at a great pace with a really varied environment and map that your characters navigate through. It also does side quests really really well, they are pretty fun and you often stumble across them accidentally based on what actions you choose to do, or from little pieces of conversation you overhear 10/10
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I'm going to be honest. I am an absolute sucker for games that explore cultures I'm not familiar with. Arco was always going to be at least a bit of a hit with me, just by virtue of showing me something I don't usually get to see. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3497013937 Arco is an action-adventure RPG. Set in an alternate (but not too alternate) fantasy version of the old west, Arco follows a series of indigenous protagonists as they embark on quests, battle monsters, and confront the changing reality of their world. And I love it. Unabashedly, unashamedly, I love it. The very first quest of the game follows an indigenous child named Teco. He and his family have journeyed from their homeland to repeat the pilgrimages their ancestors have always traditionally made. However, once they arrive at their sacred tree, they find it's been occupied by colonisers, making it impossible for them to get there. Throughout the quest, the player is shown how Teco and his family have adapted to the colonisation of their land, how they've maintained their traditions, and how what we understand to be the inevitability of colonisation is not inevitable. If anything, we're presented with a world in which the past continues to live alongside the future, and where identity remains deeply meaningful, even as the world seeks to destroy it. This is a game about colonialism that not only takes the perspective of the colonised, but ensures their voices and perspectives resonate. This isn't a horror game or a tragedy. This is an adventure in a changing, fantastic world, and I cannot express enough how much I love it for that. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3497014165 Where the game truly excels, however, is in how the message of its story resonates in its mechanics. Arco's combat system is a turn-based tactical system, with players having a variety of abilities and items that they can use to defeat enemies. Each character's abilities are different, giving each storyline a very different feel and strategy, ensuring that the combats never feel stale. However, it's the game's guilt system that makes the combat truly interesting and unique. Throughout the story sections of the game, the player is confronted with decisions. Depending on the choices they make, their character may feel more or less guilt. Rather than being solely a character-informing feature, though, guilt manifests in combat, with malevolent spirits hounding the player throughout combat, forcing them to take actions they might not otherwise have done, or to move more quickly than is necessarily wise. Trauma itself becomes a mechanic in Arco. It's highly effective, both at making the player consider their actions more carefully, and at reinforcing the overall story. This is a game where the past informs the future, where time and consequences blend together, and where we are the product of the decisions we've made. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3497013719 Arco is unlike any RPG I've played, both in terms of its setting, and in how it works the setting into the very mechanics of the game. It is a gorgeous, glorious testament to the power of storytelling and what video games can be as narrative tools. Most importantly, though, it is an example of reframing the story. This is an indigenous story, framing indigenous peoples as the arbiters of their own destinies within a changing world. It reclaims the western for those too often framed as the faceless villains, and it's wonderful for it. If you enjoyed this review, check out [url=https://www.jannekeparrish.com/game/] more of my reviews and [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44626948-Loons/] my curator page. Thanks for reading!
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I think the initial promo videos/snippets I saw of this game didn't really communicate how many systems, places, and characters eventually come together to make something quite substantial. But not too big or overwhelming -- even at its most open-world-rpg-ish, it still has the look/feel of a cute interactive clockwork diorama. It took me about 16 hours to play, not being completionist. Any game more than a few hours long tends to start generating "life is short" thoughts for me these days, but I don't regret this one. The last few hours were a compelling ride to the end. The theme helps a lot -- from the characters to the music to the locations, not much of the aesthetic here has been run into the ground yet by other games. And of course the pixel art is top shelf. FWIW I played this on the Steam Deck. _Almost_ perfect there. One game crash when I did something weird/unintended with the user interface, and one place in a long battle where the music flaked out and made glitchy sounds.
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Arco is a game that constantly feels on the cusp of being great. There's a lot to love here - fantastic art and music, a truly innovative combat system with an incredibly strong core, and lots of replay value - but the game also is very rough around the edges, from pervasive (albeit fairly minor) bugs and small mechanics that cause the game to go from fantastic to frustrating incredibly quickly. At the time of the review, I've played through the game twice - an average first playthrough probably will take between 8-12 hours depending on how much you want to poke around off of the main story. There's definitely a lot of replay value to this game - many things require two playthroughs to be seen, and there are many secrets and achievements to hunt - but I do wish the main game was a little bit longer. Arco has many clear strong points. Its art is consistently fantastic - another great example of how beautiful 2D games can be when they are made by great devs and a strong art team. Yet again, I'm left wishing that AAA game development would move away from huge, 90 GB games that lag out machines that are even just a little old and towards more of these beautiful, stylish works of art that the indie and small games scene has been creating for years. The gorgeous art is matched beat for beat by some fantastic music. In general, the audio design throughout the game is stellar, from the main OST to the little flourishes that dot the game's menus and interactions. These little details are what separates a good game from a great game, and I'm very happy to say that the devs did a great job with the SFX. Ultimately, these have to be supported by a foundation of strong gameplay, and Arco's is nothing short of innovative. There really is nothing like it - you have to play it to get it. This feels like the first game of a type, a revolutionary way to visualize moment-to-moment combat in continuous space. The game makes use of geometry and travel time to bend the way you conceptualize fights and make it feel as if no matter how stacked the odds are against you, there's always a line to win every fight. The game also pulls a trick out of Undertale's book and starts throwing enemies that move during the planning phase at you as well, so tension is always high despite it being a turn-based system. I hope more games pick up on this type of combat - I think that Arco's abilities explore this space well, but there's so much more potential to be found here. However, this is where some of the issues with the game start to show. While the combat is interesting and novel, it can also be inconsistent and frustrating at times. Especially since the game has a bad habit of just... executing your action immediately instead of giving you some time to confirm a planned move, there are a lot of fights that I had to reset due to the game jumping the gun (or failing to) with regards to my turn. In addition, while the freeform combat is on the whole a welcome change from rigid grid systems of yore, it can also add a lot of confusion based around timing. Too often, I would have no idea if an attack would go off before an enemy's (thus interrupting a lethal attack and gaining the upperhand) or after (in which case I would have to reset the fight) and it meant I would either have to play super passive or risk losing due to not knowing the order that things would execute. Having a way to see this before locking in my move would be incredibly appreciated since part of the upside of a turn-based combat system is actually getting to strategically plan around the enemies' move. I think that these are all things that are very fixable and don't detract too much from the generally positive combat experience. The ability trees are alright. It's a pretty standard progression system without too much to talk about. There are definitely many viable abilities to choose from, although I found myself just defaulting to the most utility-heavy ones since they tended to just be a bit overtuned in my experience. There's 2 bosses in Act IV and I literally never saw either of them attack once since one of the characters comes with an infinite combo at base. Definitely some tuning that could be done there (although an optional side boss in the chapter demonstrates that good fight design can help a lot by rendering the ability to perma-stun just one enemy over and over pointless). The story is serviceable, albeit linear. While I understand that the game has a grimmer tone, the lack of any contrast means that by the end of the story, the tragedy just kind of becomes background noise. I think there are other games with a similar aim in storytelling that do a much better job of making the tragedy hit harder by investing more in giving their characters moments to shine outside of the oppressive system, only to pull them back in harder and faster. Also, for a game that advertises that "Your choices matter (ooooOOoo)" they really tended to not in the grand scheme of the storyline. Compared to games like Fallout: NV where the world is ready to bend pretty drastically based on your actions, Arco's world feels like it converges back to the main story very quickly. While I have yet to do much secret hunting, I'm a little torn on how some of the secret hunting works from my experience going through two playthroughs. On one hand, the game does reward careful observation of background details and paying attention. On the other hand, getting some of the secrets and achievements can feel very obtuse and frustrating. I think compared to a game like Tunic, Arco's secrets feel a little less designed around the player experience. Tunic's secrets are great because as the player, I always have faith that I DO have the tools I need to find something and make progress on a puzzle. With Arco, there are times where I KNOW that I'm close but the game just... doesn't acknowledge it, or generally makes it unobvious whether or not I'm making progress. Maybe my opinion on this will change as I play more and find more endings, but as it stands I don't really enjoy the process of achievement/secret hunting so far. TL;DR - Arco is a strong 7/10 game with a really unique combat system and great art/music. It's a little short for the price point and rough around the edges, but it has a nice core that shines with the creators' passion.
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Arco is a magnificent game, and you, dear reader, should play it. The fundamental reason is the storytelling: it combines the vibes and pulpiness of a vengeance western with a nuanced and very human look at colonisation and the price of resisting it. It also does it in a world that is not portrayed as a sort of suffering grimdark horror tale, but as somewhere with real joy and hope and silliness and therefore a much more real sense of pain when the story shows how fragile those things are. I laughed at a donkey braying at me when I petted it too much, and a little creature that wanted to make a shop but only accepted sticks as currency, and at digging for supplies and finding an anachronistic toaster... and, equally, it hit hard when major characters died or you saw a burned village that you'd been talking to everyone in not so long before. People in the story are human and treated as such, and that in many ways makes the villains more frightening: the invaders and colonisers aren't zombies or a faceless horde, they're people. Which means they, in some way, and for myriad reasons, *chose* this. It's very good writing. The storytelling is also backed up by absolutely drop-dead gorgeous landscape pixel art. It's genuinely stunning and enormously evocative, and honestly part of me wishes there was a post-game where I could just wander the whole game world as a surviving character to go "ooooh" at the pretty scenery and make some bits of money and chat to the NPCs. Having a setting for a fantasy RPG (including fantasy creatures, ruined temples, quests, the works) that is so heavily rooted in south America is really refreshing rather than another implicitly pseudo-late-medieval-Europe knockoff, and I say that as a professional medieval historian! The combat gameplay is the bit that takes a little time to get used to, especially the meta-level where the expectation is that you might need to "rewind" from failed combats to rejig your inventory and skills before having another go - but the reason it takes time is mostly a good one, which is that the mechanics are very locked into how the game works and work with that. The gameplay is fun once you're used to it and offers quite a lot of pacy tactical puzzling as you go. Actually mechanising the characters' hope and guilt in manifested ways was also really interesting and I liked it a lot. So, yeah. This is probably one of the best indie games I've seen released in the last couple of years, and I really strongly recommend it to anyone who's inclined to have a go.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Arco is currently priced at 17.99€ on Steam.
Arco is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 17.99€ on Steam.
Arco received 1,456 positive votes out of a total of 1,504 achieving an impressive rating of 9.16.
😍
Arco was developed by Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki and Fáyer and published by Panic.
Arco is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Arco is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
Arco is not playable on Linux.
Arco is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for Arco. Explore additional content available for Arco on Steam.
Arco does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Arco does not support Steam Remote Play.
Arco is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Arco.
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 07 September 2025 19:16 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 15 September 2025 01:37 |
| Steam price | 19 September 2025 04:49 |
| Steam reviews | 18 September 2025 16:03 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Arco, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Arco
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Arco concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Arco compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
8
Developer
Franek,
Max Cahill,
Bibiki,
Fáyer
Publisher
Panic
Release
15 Aug 2024
Platforms