Plenty of video games have tried to create their own spin on the American Western. Red Dead Redemption is the most famous example, but you can also look to games like Call of Juarez, Gun, or Desperados. Even if you’ve played all of those games, I’m willing to bet you’ve still never played a Western like Arco.
Published by Panic, Arco is a pixelated adventure that flips the genre on its head in several ways. Players don’t control a grizzled cowboy blasting their way through the American frontier. Instead, the story follows a cast of Indigenous characters in early Mesoamerica fighting to protect their land and loved ones from colonizers. It’s the total role reversal that the genre needs, and it’s handled as creatively as possible.
What’s immediately striking about Arco is its subversive structure. It plays like an anthology, as players jump between three different characters at war with the greedy Red Company. Its five chapters not only explore the conflict from different perspectives but paint a full portrait of the culture and customs of its Indigenous people. It’s not just about getting revenge on bandits; it’s just as much about using recourses with care, respecting the land, and honoring the dead.
All of those ideas are represented in clever gameplay hooks. For instance, there’s a choice system that runs through each character’s story. Making poor decisions can put guilt on that hero that manifests in battles. For instance, in one story I found myself in a local graveyard where I found a necklace on a grave. I hastily picked it up, as I would in any other game, not realizing I was disturbing a keepsake. For the next few hours, I had to deal with ghosts appearing during my battles until I found a way to cleanse my soul. It’s one of many ingenious systems here that makes every choice meaningful. You’re not meant to rush through the adventure but rather take it slow and learn from the land and its people.
The bulk of its systems flow back into its unique approach to combat. Battles play out like a turn-based strategy game where both parties move simultaneously. When I enter a fight, I see everything from a top-down perspective. I’m frozen in time until I choose to move or attack my enemies. When I do that, they move too. An icon above their head signals what they’ll do when they unfreeze, whether they’re preparing to shoot at me or reposition. Each turn becomes a puzzle as I figure out the best way to spend each turn to make sure I’m dodging incoming damage and hitting enemies when a safe opening presents itself.
Each character handles battle very differently, as they have their own skill trees. One is more of an evasive ranger who can fire arrows from afar, while another is a close-range hitter who can leap down on enemies and pummel them to interrupt their attacks. I can only equip so many skills at once, and each one has a mana cost attached to it, so I need to be strategic about how I balance my offensive and defensive tools. It’s a clever system, though an admittedly tricky one to get the hang of. Going into battle with the wrong skills equipped or with low health can result in plenty of frustrating deaths. Trial and error is the key to victory.
What I love about that system is how surprisingly well it captures the feeling of Western action. When I shoot out a flurry of arrows on one turn and use my next to dodge incoming bullets, I feel like Clint Eastwood fanning his revolver out in A Fistful of Dollars. It may happen in starts and stops, but I can picture how the sequence would flow out in real time. It’s a similar approach to that of John Wick Hex, which lets players feel the tactical, split-second decision-making of the films’ fast-paced gun-fu.
There’s plenty I can gush about from a systems level, but none of that would be nearly as interesting without the Indigenous focus that grounds it all. Arco is a necessary inversion of the Western, one that’s about living in harmony with the land rather than treating it as dangerous grounds to be conquered. It takes the “wild” out of “Wild West.” It’s only lawless to those who think they’re above the laws of nature.
Arco is out now for PC and Nintendo Switch.
(Note: If you’re going to buy Arco, stay far away from the Nintendo Switch version. It’s a shockingly poor port in which battles fall well below 10 frames per second regularly and often crash under that weight. I’m hoping that version gets sharpened up soon, because it never should have released at all. You’ll be doing yourself a disservice by grabbing it there.)
