Ratings and Reviews by Jo the Plunderer

While Arcadie: Second-Born focused on your unexpected rise to power, Arcadie: Cold Lands follows an MC who is now monarch of the Kingdom of Arcadie and forced to start making decisions that will affect not just the citizens of Arcadie but all the surrounding kingdoms, all while continuing a romance from the previous game (or starting a new one). Thousands of lives are at stake: will you pursue war or peace?

On the surface, the series has made some improvements since Second-Born. The author moved to a more visual novel style format, with light background music and images, and the MC is far more powerful in this game and has far more agency. But with no stats, lower stakes, and no clear overarching plotline, it’s just not as strong a game as the first. A lot of fans are still really enjoying it, and I personally hope it does well enough for us to see a Game 3, but I get that some players are pretty frustrated with some of the changes.

If you liked the first game but aren't sure if you'll like this one, I've done a more detailed review for free on Substack. https://jotheplunderer.substack.com/p/arcadie-cold-lands-a-review

A lot of people love this game, like really really love it, so I'm not going to tell anyone not to play it (especially since you can play it for free), but it just wasn't my cup of tea. It's right in the game description that this is a philosophical romance, but neither the philosophical nor romantic elements really hit home for me personally, and it's not the most exciting game apart from that. I did enjoy the setting (you're a tour guide on the moon), the quiet vibe, and some of the meta game-within-a-game elements nonetheless.

Much of the game is just you talking to the NPCs (the developers of the video game your MC is playing through) about big topics: life, death, art, motivation, game development, and so on. The characters are engaging enough to talk to, but I found that many of these conversations just didn't work for me in this format. The topics themselves are important ones, but for me they are big enough questions that I've already wrestled with most of them before and had much better experiences talking about them IRL than with some NPCs. It felt like I was often just repeating the same sentiment three choices in a row instead of having a real back and forth conversation.

Based on how other people talk about this game, I think maybe it's the sort of game that'll really hit home if you're in the right kind of mindset for it. If you're interested in these topics, but maybe haven't already formed your opinion on them, you might get more out of the themes than I did.

Romance was okay but maybe a bit forced/rushed. You only really spend a few days with these people, so I found it hard to believe the connection was as strong as the game suggested.

Not bad overall, might even warrant a replay down the road, but I'm not feeling that motivated just now.

I'm giving it four stars just because the meta, game within a game elements were quite intriguing, even if there's not much else to the game. A really interesting use of code where each replay is just a bit different from the last (well, your first three plays in the game at least will all have a bit of different text and some new options to reflect that you have played this game before, with your MC getting a bit of deja vu and whatnot). You absolutely have to replay it to get the full experience, probably a few times, though I only made it 2.5 times before I just code dived to sate the rest of my curiosity.

Which is when I realised...there's really not much else to it. Like even the big mystery at the end (you might want to Google) just...didn't feel worth solving.

I guess I just expected to be rewarded more for replays, like have a chance to actually find out something meaningful about the game or do something that mattered, but I'm really not seeing anything substantial on either front. It's possible I'm missing something though.

In the end, my initial intrigue morphed into a feeling of emptiness. The game is as meaningless of the life of the MC. Despite its introspective, philosophical kind of writing style, it really doesn't seem to say or do much. At least not for me.

Worth a couple plays if you like seeing people do cool things with code. Just be warned that you won't get a ton in terms of character development or a satisfying narrative; these things aren't at all the point of the game.

Took me a while to get into this one and if I'm being honest I would've given up if I wasn't just stubborn about finishing these things, but I'm glad I did. Perhaps my favorite thing about this game is how you start as a teenager and grow old together with the characters. The bond my MC had with Tesla was something so beautiful and sweet, deepened over decades of working together, and I don't think I've ever had such strong feelings at the end of an IF.

I felt like the whole point of this game was to ask big ethical questions but I personally did not find these particular big ethical questions altogether compelling, and I didn't leave the game with any real food for thought. I mostly was just frustrated that I didn't get to take a more nuanced approach to the tech in the game. My MC opposed the tech on philosophical grounds, and yet to do this I had to side with a really rotten, shady "philanthropist" type. Like why couldn't I oppose both the tech AND this rotten, greedy woman? My ending just felt really off because of the way the game sort of pushed me in one direction based on my MC's hard stance against the tech.

Just felt like if you're going to make a story based on asking ethical questions, you really ought to give us more options to explore said questions.

Not a bad game, but forgettable for me personally.