There are many reasons to play and write about Arco. The Mesoamerican pixelart landscapes, for example – radiant, cloud-hung platters of land with people and buildings reduced to daubs of paint in the foreground. The fact that it’s about witnessing and surviving colonial invasion, rather than the more familiar European or North American video game fantasy of searching a New World for plunder.
The ensemble storytelling, with four, successively playable characters setting their own lenses to thickly entangled themes of sorrow, vengeance and growing understanding. The sparse, expressive dialogue, each phrase carefully tucked inside its speech bubble. The music. And the little things at the level of how you move, what you do. When you pick a faraway destination on your map, your character makes the journey screen by screen, which gives you a second to lean back and be a passenger, watching the horizon, at least until you’re ambushed by a giant beetle.
