Arx Fatalis

Made by Arkane Studios, Arx Fatalis is a first person Western RPG that was intended as a Spiritual Successor to the Ultima Underworld series, and has become somewhat of a Cult Classic.

Your character wakes up in a prison with amnesia, and soon finds out (unless you watched the intro, then you alreddy know) he is in a world where the sun has burned out and various different races (through a rare moment of cooperation) have been forced to move into underground Dwarven tunnels and rebuild. After escaping, the Human player character heads for the now-underground Human Kingdom of Arx Fatalis in hope of finding his purpose.

The gameplay itself is very free-roaming after the initial tutorial sections, and many sections can be solved in different ways depending on the specialty skills the player has chosen. A notable feature is the magic system, which requires the player to cast spells by making various mouse gestures.

Tropes used in Arx Fatalis include:

• Advancing Boss of Doom: Black Beast.
• All Just a Dream: The most frightening scene in a game involves Alia and Am Shaegar sitting on the bed (possibly after a sexual intercourse). Camera cuts to Alia's face, which suddenly transforms into ghoul-like creature from the crypt. The next second the scene repeats itself, but without her transformation.
• Amnesiac Hero
• Apocalypse How: A bit of a strange example as, while the sun burning out has caused somewhat of an apocalypse, most have survived it. Also the ending suggests there is hope of moving back to the surface in the future.
• Awesome but Impractical: Lightning Bolt and Slow Time.
• Awesome Yet Practical: A Fireball and Speed spells. And the Ultimate Weapon.
• Bad with the Bone: Guess what is Am Shaegar's first weapon.
• Baleful Polymorph: Lord Inut.
• Bandit Mook: Ratmen can steal your money diring a fight.
• BFS: Inut's Giant Magic Sword. A lessser one is Giant Slayer blade. They, however, require a great strength to use.
• Bittersweet Ending: Everything seems to be okay, Akbaa is banished forever, his cult is wrecked and beheaded, king Lunshire meets his long-lost daughter and "rebels", who turn to be her protectors, probably will rejoin Arx kingdom... but still, all they are forced to live underground and neither PC nor Noden have power to bring the sun back to Arx.
• Bling Bling Bang: Nastily subverted. With a secret spell, you can summon an extremely tough warrior demoness, armed with BFS and clad in what looks golden Ylside armor, who attacks you. After you kill her, in a fair fight or using some trick, she explodes, but you can pick up her sword and a random piece of her armor (helmet, leggings of chestplate) appears in your inventory. However, those pieces are breakable, have no model (they become invisible if you put them on), and have poor armor class compared with Ylside armor. Leggings have decent armor class (the second largest, actually), but still are twice weaker than Ylside ones and not worth those fight, and the chest plate, probably due to mistake, is as good as plain ordinary chestplate (four times worse than Ylside). At least the golden helmet plays it straight, as it's the strongest helmet in a game.
• Body Horror: Akbaa at the end of the game.
• Bonus Boss: A hidden spell summons (which one depends on Random Number God) either a huge lightning-fast rat or a warrior demoness with BFS who has enemies' powers combined and is nearly impossible to kill.
• Bonus Dungeon: The lowest parts of the crypts, although going there is essential to getting the good ending.
• Boring but Practical: Harm, Poison cloud, Repel Undead, any weapon enchanted with Paralyse.
• Breakable Weapons: Except mithril and meteor ones. Evrything you hit will erode your weapon, and somewhere far from civilization, it may become an issue. You can repair it yourself (generally bad idea), pay to the blacksmith or enchant it with a special item to make it undesrtuctible.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Kultar, your fellow prisoner from the very beginning of the game, returns to save you near the end if you help him.
• Convection, Schmonvection: At some of the lower levels, you can stay near lava safely as long as you don't touch it.
• Damsel in Distress: Alia, though only episodically, and Shany.
• Deadpan Snarker: The dragon.
• Deal with the Devil: While the Sisters of Ederneum are more neutral than evil, King Poxsellis made a deal with them for his fourth-generation descendant to become their new queen in exchange for the powerful artifacts Krahoz and Zohark.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Akbaa, although it is just an avatar, and the main character is implied to be on the verge of becoming a relative god himself at that point.
• Difficult but Awesome: Drawing runes with the mouse to cast spells requires practice (especially in combat), but looks magnificent.
• Disc One Nuke: After some early quest, nothing prevents you from travelling to the very rock bottom of the world, where you can get some nice weapons and items and tons of XP.
• Drop in Nemesis: In dwarven mines, you are hunted by Black Beast, a Nigh Invulnerable One-Hit Kill Mighty Glacier Puzzle Boss. You have to activate a steam hammer, lure the beast under it by whatever means and smash it. This, howewer, just slows it down, but now you can move into other room and throw a lever, which releases another lever, which, it turn, opens the Lava Pit so you can lure the monster there. Hell, Black Beast is so slow, so why bother with whole hammer thing, let's go for the lever already! Well, go and try. Once you throw the lever, the damn creature starts running, effectively going Nigh Invulnerable One-Hit Kill Lightning Bruiser. Naturally, your chances of survival plummet. Also, see Karmic Death below.
• Dug Too Deep: The Dwarfs, who moved to the lowest levels of the mine and came across a monster during their continued digging.
• Eldritch Abomination: While Akbaa has to possess a body to manifest on Arx Fatalis, the glimpses of his true form seem to be almost nothing but tentacles and eyeballs.
• Enemy Summoner: Iserbius loves summoning the demons, and Liches sometimes spawn zombies.
• Energy Being: Guardians while in Noden.
• Everything Fades: Mostly averted but played straight with Ylsides, who explode after death so you can't loot their awesome armor.
• Fake Skill/Fake Difficulty/Acceptable Breaks From Reality: Lampshaded beautifully and justified by the dragon, who goes on a speech about this being PC's powers and limitations due to him being a Guardian from another world. According to dragon, what we see as Save Scumming is some Time Travel related power which allows the Guardian to foresee potentionally dangerous situations.
• Feigning Intelligence: Goblins. All goblins, every time. And it's charming.
• Functional Magic: There's hints that magic is the main reason the races were able to continue surviving after the sun went out.
• Good Is Not Nice: It isn't stated anywhere that a world-saver demigod can't rob a bank (howewer, its owner and especially his fiancee can count as Asshole Victim). Or simply loot everything that isn't nailed down or on fire (and if it is, you have a pickaxe and Douse spell).
• Grid Inventory/Inventory Management Puzzle
• Guide Dang It: Some of the actions you must make to progress have incredibly vague hints, or almost none at all.
• Implacable Man: Black Beast is undestructible. Can reach The Juggernaut levels when you see the sheer slaughter and devastation it brought.
• Infant Immortality: Averted if you fail a certain side quest.
• Infinity-1 Sword: Four of them (the stronger the sword the harder it is to obtain): Giant Slayer blade, forged two-handed sword, giant life-draining, paralysing sword of Inut, mithril two-handed sword. The latter may be later remade into Infinity+1 Sword.
• Infinity+1 Sword: The meteorite sword, forged with Mithril and enchanted with meteor dust.
• Interface Screw: A Paralyse is a major one if casted on you. Even cursor is paralyzed.
• Item Crafting
• Jump Physics: Really awkward, on the verge of Good Bad Bugs. You can somehow move twice faster by bunny-hopping and negate all falling damage by jumping off the ledge rather than walkking off it, but there is a dreaded jump-puzzle involving tiny platforms and lava...
• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts. Subverted twice: at the beginning, goblins don't trade jewels because trolls, who do the mining work, went on strike. So, you can buy cheap "goblin mine" stock certificates, then improve the situation with mines yourself and sell them back at double cost as their price rises. Later, if you bring a book about commerce and finance to a troll king, he'll screw the goblins and sale jewels himself, and you, as friend of trolls, will have a HUGE discount. Otherwise played stright. Also subverted if you have high Intuition, but it's completely useless in any other situation.
• Karmic Death:
  • The key for the outer world door is posessed by King Lunshire and can't be stolen. Opening the door is completely unnecessary and has no quest related, so in order to open it, you must murder the king (who is actually nice and tragic person) to satisfy your curiosity. However, if you open the door, a powerful gust of frost freezes you solid and dead.
  • If priests who kidnapped a little girl to sacrifice her succeed in doing so, a demon will be summoned and immediately kills them.
• Kill It with Fire: Fireball/Incinerate woks wonders with Ylsides, as well with everything else except Akbaa which is deliberately fireproof. Mummies are especially sensitive to fire.
• Lightning Bruiser: Pretty much every tough enemy (and player himself with Speed and the Ultimate Weapon). Ylside (well, at least until their Speed spell empties their mana bar), a dragon, summonable Demon Rat and Demoness Warrior and, the worst, Black Beast in turbo mode (see Drop in Nemesis).
• Magic Knight: Even playing a character with a heavy focus on melee and Rogue skills, magic is still frequently essential to solving puzzles and fighting certain enemies.
• Mama Bear/Papa Wolf. The dragon, exact gender unknown. Subverted as it can sell one his egg to the PC. Double subverted as it knows it's necessary for saving the world and at least wants a compensation for such a sacrifice.
• Meaningful Name: Lord Inut, obsessed with chickens to the degree of insanity, and Falan Orbiplanax, the astronomer.
• Mighty Glacier: Liches, Black Beast and Akbaa himself.
• Multiple Endings: While the main ending is the same, a few sidequests have a major influence on the resolution of one of the central plot-lines of the game.
• Nobody Poops:
  • Averted. Alotar, the king of goblins, shouldn't drink wine, as his stomack can't hold it. So, in order to get him out of his locked trone room, you douse his dinner with wine, and Hilarity Ensues.
  • Another poor goblin apparently ate too much rotten fish today...
• No Name Given: PC's (nick)name, Am Shaegar, literally means "the nameless one".
• Pound of Flesh Twist: In the good resolution to the plot, when the Sisters of Ederneum come to take away princess Alia to become their new queen, it is revealed she is the fifth-generation descendant of Poxsellis and not the fourth, saving her from that fate.
• Powered Armor: A magical example, strength-boosting Ylside armor.
• Power Glows: Enchanted weapons.
• Puzzle Boss: Black Beast.
• The Reveal: The player character being from another world. The discovery of the lost princess of Arx Fatalis and why the Sisters of Ederneum are helping the Human kingdom.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Rats. And Ratmen. And, good god, the summonable demon rat.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: King Lunshire is skilled in diplomacy and managed to save the most of his (if not the worlds) people by convincing all races, even those who were mortal enemies, to join forces for common survival. His father Poxsellis was a great warrior who combined splitted domains (whose lords he defeated in Combat by Champion) into the kingdom of Arx.
• Schmuck Bait: On fourth level, you find a trail lined up of gold pieces. It leads you to a chest where goblin's voices can be heard. Of course, you open the chest, and three goblins attack you. The chest is empty.
• Shaky POV Cam: Enter the Black Beast.
• Shoulders of Doom: Ylside armor.
• Significant Anagram: Suiberis is Iserbius.
• Slasher Smile: Seconds before slashing at you, Black Beast raises its paw and tilts its head, giving the impression of a nightmarish smile.
• Spontaneous Human Combustion: An Incinerate Spell works this way.
• Stone Wall: An interesting case is that it can be played Up to Eleven. If you pump every point into defense, you will efficiently and very quickly become Nigh Invulnerable. Even Black Beast, a One-Hit Kill on legs, can't hurt you; however, being also Nigh Invulnerable (though rather Mighty Glacier), it can corner you and make you starve to death.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Incinerate and Mass Incinerate spells.
• Turned Against Their Masters: From all things you can summon, only the chicken won't attack you at first glance.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: Dwarwes. Well, there is actually the Ultimate Forge, and all blacksmiths were eaten.
• Underground Level: The entire game, for obvious reasons.
• The Unintelligible: The Ratmen.
• Useless Useful Spell: Life Drain. It will deplete your mana meter in seconds and works only in very small radius (roughly ONE step). You surely do not want to get that close to stronger enemies as they deal more damage than the spell heals, and weaker ones are pretty well killed without it.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Iserbius genuinely believes that Akbaa will bring the sun back.
  • Also, Captain Carlo, who assassinated the queen because he suspected her in a conspiracy against the king, but could not tell the latter, knowing it would break his heart.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Poxsellis' ghost is really and rightfully pissed at you for busting his grave and stealing his helmet.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: You have to eat occasionally to not starve, but there's more than enough food for it to not become an issue.