You might be looking at this thinking ‘huh, I like old school RPGs and somehow I never heard of this one, maybe it’s worth a shot’.

And you can be forgiven for thinking that, because Arcanum has a unique setting, a striking visual art style, and an amazing soundtrack. There’s a lot of really cool stuff on display here, and for 2001, it was incredibly ambitious. Heck, the manual that comes with the game alone is a work of art.

Unfortunately, there’s a reason that Troika went bankrupt. The execution is utterly abysmal. Arcanum is buggy and janky, with terrible balance and linear gameplay. The unofficial patch fixes literally hundreds of bugs, but it can’t save you from poor design. Combat, world navigation, character building, inventory management - it's all bad, underwhelming at best and actively annoying at worst.

To make matters worse, the Steam port appears to be a janky port of a janky game. Windowed mode is not on the table, and the game glitches or crashes at the drop of a hat. Again, you can spend a few hours modding your way out of some of these issues if you’re determined, but who wants to do that? Products you have to spend hours making work are bad products.

Though it has a small cohort of die-hard fans, Arcanum faded into obscurity for a reason. The game has issues, and those issues have only grown more obvious with age. I wouldn’t recommend it.