Bytes ‘n’ Blurts: Agonizing Arco and Adorable Animal Athletics

Wondering what the Paste Games team has been playing lately? Don’t have time to read new game reviews, and prefer something quick and direct? Just looking for 1000 words to eat up a couple of minutes of your wait at the doctor’s office or airport lobby? Bytes ‘n’ Blurts offers a quick look at what games editor Garrett Martin and assistant games editor Elijah Gonzalez have been playing over the last week—from the latest releases to whatever classic or forgotten obscurity is taking up our free time. During this short holiday week, they’ve been catching up on one of 2024’s most acclaimed and underplayed games, as well as an adorable competitive game from all the way back in 2016.

Arco

Year: 2024

Platforms: PC, Switch

Arco‘s become the odds-on favorite to win the unofficial “most overlooked game” tag this year; the turn-based strategy adventure from a quartet of international designers didn’t get much attention when it came out in August, shortly before the Fall games crush began, but the people and outlets that did play it then immediately raved about it. A social media post from one of its developers about its financial failure has boosted its profile and sales lately, so perhaps it’ll become the success it deserves to be. (Sadly Paste is part of the problem; although I planned on reviewing it in August, it aligned with a period of time when I took four trips in two weeks for our travel section; sorry, Arco!) Now that I’ve caught up with it, I agree that it’s something special, but also really frustrating in a few ways. It’s a smart, sharply written, emotionally powerful game about a Mesoamerican civilization slowly being destroyed by colonialism, a pixelated revisionist Western in which the “newcomers” and the corporation they work for gleefully wipe out whole societies to maximize profits. The dialogue options are sparse but incisive and define characters quickly but clearly, and the vignette-style approach to the story gives a deeper and more expansive view of this culture and the war it’s destined to lose. And its battles are thrillingly unique for the genre; although you input orders for your characters one at a time, their actions are then carried out in real time, so you’ll have to predict your enemies’ tactics in advance. It’s more dynamic and challenging than the traditional Civilization or Final Fantasy Tactics biz, and its complexity and fluidity is always energizing. It can also be infuriating, though; although whatever main character you’re controlling is always armed with a bow (the arco of the title), you’ll almost always be not just outnumbered but also outgunned by bandits and corporate mercenaries. Battles are a high-wire act where you have to keep your fighters constantly moving, making sure you don’t guide them directly into the gunfire that often fills the screen, while also keeping them close enough to the enemies to get hits in. Adding to the difficulty are frequent environmental hazards that can both help and hurt you, and a mechanic where your character is literally haunted by the violence they’ve had to commit (unbeatable ghosts slowly roam the battlefield, beelining straight for you like a sedated, spectral Otto from Berzerk). After the first two or three battles, every fight is easy to lose if you aren’t always careful and a little bit lucky. That’s actually good and exciting, except technical issues on the Switch add an unintentional and unwanted extra degree of difficulty, as it regularly stutters and shudders during combat. (And that’s docked, not in hand.) I can’t advise playing this on the Switch at all, unfortunately; the performance is surprisingly creaky throughout, taking a solid minute to load up whenever you launch the game, and slowing down like an NES game during most battles. (This is all after a patch, too, meaning this is somehow a notable improvement on how it performed when it first came out.) I haven’t tried it on PC or Steam Deck, but I have to assume it’s better there than on the Switch. As annoying as those issues can be, they don’t detract from the strength of Arco‘s storytelling or its vivid evocation of a disappearing world.—Garrett Martin

Ultimate Chicken Horse

Year: 2016

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch

Do you like causing your friends platforming-based agony, the likes of which haven’t been seen since that time you forced them to try your ontologically evil Super Mario Maker levels? Ultimate Chicken Horse is a party game where you and your buddies cooperatively craft platforming challenges before jumping into these obstacle courses and trying to reach the finish line for points. Zero points are rewarded if no one can clear the stage or if everyone does, meaning you must collectively strike a balance between making things too easy or too hard. At the end of a round, you can each add one new platform or hazard as you try to fine-tune things to reach this happy medium. The results are often hilarious as you accidentally create extremely janky nightmare stages that are either outright impossible or close to it, and while the tools to craft these areas are simple, the overall experience taps into a bit of the creativity that comes from designing things in more involved level editors.

In general, there’s a strange mixture of competition and cooperation involved. While you each want to be the first to reach the flagpole at the end, you will inevitably take each other’s lead when finding the best path to navigate the maze of deadly obstacles you’ve come together to create. Altogether, it results in one of those clever experiences where you can’t help but wonder why no one else had come up with this idea before, as it mixes creativity and competitive platforming to form tons of memorable disasters. While the controls are simple—your only actions are to run, jump, and crouch—the platforming controls quite tightly, which is a good thing considering how tough these trials will become. Between its ingenious setup, adorable aesthetic, and guarantee that every run will be different, Ultimate Chicken Horse has managed to stay in my friend group’s rotation for years, and for good reason.—Elijah Gonzalez