Game Thoughts: Arco
How much hatred can you stuff into a handful of pixels? That's the question Arco tries to ask as you control a handful of characters through Mesoamerica to kill the "Newcomers" who are murdering your people for the gold and oil in your lands.
It's an absolute blast. The story is dark, but lined with quirky humour. The vistas are pixel-art masterpieces, and the characters are somehow still discernable despite being made up of only a couple pixels themselves.
The battle system's where the game shines the brightest. It's a very fresh-feeling tactics-style RPG where you plan out each character's action in freeze-time, then everyone on the screen moves at once. There's lots of skills in each characters' tree, and while there's really not a tonne of room for diversification (each character stays in their niche), the game's short enough that it didn't matter much.
There was one thing I very much didn't like about the game. The Ghosts. If you rack up too much "guilt" by making shit choices, ghosts will show up in battle. Unlike everything else on the screen they do not respect the time-freeze portions of battle and instead slowly approach while you're trying to make decisions.
When there's only one character in your party this isn't too bad, but since there's often times with more than one character you need to pick an action for before everyone moves these ghosts can be crazy stressful to be floating around.
As a result I ended up playing the "low-guilt" storyline. I have no regrets! I watched some youtube playthroughs and there's definitely more content if you go full-guilt, but I'll live having beaten the game myself once.
Great little game. Do recommend.