I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there’s nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy’s move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.
Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I’ve been playing, I’m often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it’s going to explode and do me massive damage.
I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.
