Artis Impact Review (PC) – Blunt Force Trauma
I’m not sure if anything anyone told me about Artis Impact would have prepared me for this quirky yet odd, charming yet frustrating, strange yet sort of boring game. Billed as a love letter to RPGs of old, lovingly handcrafted in expressive pixel art over the last five years, in RPG Maker MV no less, Artis Impact is somehow, unbelievably, the work of a single developer.
And that marketing is way off for a reason. I went in expecting an indie JRPG, and while I got turn-based battles, stats, a story, and a world map, that stuff largely felt like window dressing. What will make or break you liking the game is all the other stuff on top. It’s got this quirky, often dumb sense of humour, it’s detailed beyond the point any sane solo dev should have stopped, yet it barely ever engages in telling me an actual engaging story. It’s concurrently the most human, most Gen Z game I’ve experienced in some time, and the most frustrating to use, impenetrable sometimes in its near constant avoidance of convention. And kind of unimportantly it’s an RPG.
I will try to give you a basic plot summary of the start of the game, but it’s barely more than you pick up after five minutes, or similarly after some two hours. Akane is some kind of newly recruited agent – a Lith – adept at battling archaic robot AIs but still just starting out. She lives in a little one-bed shack with her own Nier Automata-like bot hovering nearby, giving constant sass, and reports to work under the command of a general who very knowingly gives out nonsensical missions and fetch quests. It’s fourth-wall breaking, discussing the nature of the programming of the game, or the point of a quest, or the fact that you’ll fail a quest. It’s self-aware in a way that would break immersion in any larger game, but in a quirky little indie seems somehow fine.
Akane is more likely to engage in asides about snacks and buttons and titanium doors, than she is to actually engage in meaningful lore and narrative. Your companions spend reams of their dialogue helpfully not helping, berating women for not being in the kitchen and then getting punched, or otherwise being weird all the time. No one seems to take seriously the post-apocalyptic threat of AI robots bearing down on them, to the point I wondered if possibly it wasn’t even real and I was missing something. The game’s dialogue and narrative constantly seeks to undo itself.
The narrative takes hours to build any flesh on the bones I’ve described, and even when you reach the end at something like seven hours down, it felt empty, sort of devoid of any real meaning. It had this very shallow feel of a lot of anime, aimed at what a western audience might call a YA or young adult market. Like I know Akane really likes Mochi balls, but what was really happening with the end of the world? After about four hours, I really struggled to keep going, and found what is a bite-sized RPG more of a slog to get through than a better 30-hour game.
Combat is a strange but fast and responsive turn-based system. You choose between basic attacks, Arts, guarding for your turn, or using an item. You take your chosen shot, damage the enemy, and then you take your licks. Your little Bot also has an automated turn of his own, which starts out being dedicated to a regen-like healing process, but you can later amend it to whatever helpful augments you find.
However, what sounds serviceable on paper is just far too basic in practice. You just click click your way through battles with the attack command, and maybe one skill and done. Once you have a few high-powered Arts, you can one-shot your way through 95% of battles. It’s so simplistic it undermines the point of having the system in the first place.
I also never found a tutorial on countering, but countering and parrying do seem to exist and they aren’t very concerned with the timing of your counter click. I was button-mashing my attack command through a battle just to finish it, when I discovered the counter – suddenly I was doing even more damage, knocking enemies out in moments, and making a laughable system even sillier. If you can button-mash the counter prompt, it removes any need for skill. Battles become rote, and kind of pointless.
Maybe as a consequence of its lack of forward-moving plot, Aris Impact really excels at the kind of opposite extreme, a kind of dopamine-hit exploration. Every single screen is filled with interactivity, item descriptions, quips, and conversations between Bot and Akane. There’s almost always an item to be found or an upgrade, or money, or something. I found my way out onto the world map, technically before I was supposed to, and the game didn’t miss a beat, it just presented a handful of random places to find and raid for items, more quirky surface-level character building conversations, a strange contemplation of jumping off a cliff, and an episode where Akane fell asleep in a cave, before I was organically brought back to the route to the objective.
One weird part was going on a mission, being asked to scout the local area, and then finding that scouting was an incidental loading screen that automatically found locations for you that you couldn’t find by simply stumbling onto them when you just ventured out onto the world map. Super disappointing.
That same section, a sort of Spa area that needed defending for very little reason, was the beginning of the end for me. I hit my head against yet more superfluous systems such as a lemonade machine that made you spare cash, or having 12 days at this base, only to need less than 10 to complete the objective, and then being able to just spend forever there if you wanted. Artis Impact is full of ideas, but rarely do they seem to serve the larger whole, move the game forward, or mean anything beyond the moment.
I’m trying to think of any valuable comparisons to make to other existing games, but Artis Impact really does have a special little identity all its own even if it’s borrowing from just about everywhere. It’s got that fourth wall-breaking Gen Z crazy dialogue of something like the recent After Love EP, or Persona at its oddest; it’s got a lead character who wouldn’t look out of place in a pixelated Nier Automata. It’s got Sword and Sworcery Superbrothers or Animal Well’s art and weirdness. But all those games work better.
My main positive with Artis Impact, is the art. I mean, lean into that factor in the title, why don’t ya? There are countless gorgeous pieces of still artwork, beautiful locations, and areas to explore. The cutscene style, like a kind of comic book or manga constantly editing over itself, worked really well, even if the interactions and scenes were often so lacking. And the pixel art, especially of Akane herself, is luxuriously animated – her swaying dress, her sword moves, the expressive way she flops down on a bed or hops into baths, things like that. There’s a hell of a lot to love in Mas’ pixelwork.
Artis Impact just seems so directionless and unsure of itself. If it wanted to be this quirky thing, then that’s fine, but I think it’ll grate on more than just me. The narrative design might have had meaning I missed, but many hours in, I felt completely uninvested. The combat system being so easy and superfluous only adds to that feeling of why am I bothering? My patience with the game ended with the mission structure, where you go to your mission and you’re just kind of abandoned there and you do some fights and you waste time, and sleep in order to slowly count through the mission day counter, and I just came out the other end thinking I’d wasted an hour of my life.
The save function seems decidedly flaky, like I was able to almost erase my progress in a single unwary button press. Too easily done, despite the warnings the game gives you that this is possible. Well, make it not possible. It says you can have one save file, then presents four. I’m still confused now.
If the art style makes you swoon, and the quirkiness and charm win you over and you don’t find it tiresome, Artis Impact may have something for you. The humour at least will serve to keep you playing, and it’s only about eight hours long. For me, the vast number of things I didn’t like – combat, repetitiveness, world, characters, superfluous systems – outweighed any few I did – the art and inventiveness – and I lost all steam and will to continue. I think with a team around them with the skill to craft narrative and meaningful interactions and characters, Mas could animate and direct something incredible and eye-catching. Artis Impact hints at this skill – I mean they made this all in RPG Maker! – but is ultimately let down by so many other factors.
Artis Impact is available now on PC via Steam (review platform).
Developer: Mas
Publisher: Feuxon
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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