Arx Fatalis
Though flawed in many ways, Arx Fatalis can be very satisfying for gamers who are ready to take it slow. It asks of you to be methodical with its nonintuitive UI and controls, to slowly explore a samey game world modeled on a labyrinth, and to very often be left with no cues for where you should go next.
The best thing about it is how self-contained it is. Literally. Putting an entire game into a single dungeon can be a productive conceit for RPGs. We loved it in Dungeon Master and Ultima Underworld, and it works well here, too. The quests are all rather straightforward, but they take place in specific areas. You're not going to be riding a horse to another town, as in Elder Scrolls. You're just going to be walking through tunnels and halls. These constraints keep the game focused and intense, and help maintain an immersive and appropriately claustrophobic atmosphere.
That said, the game world is disappointingly sparse. Too much of it is just ... tunnels and halls. And more often than not they are empty. There was an opportunity here to create a dense experience, but the result has as much copy-paste as you would find in any "open world" game with vast distances between points of interest. You'll be slowly walking through tunnels. A lot. And when you do finally reach something, it's lackluster. Level design is just weak.
The complaints about the UI are justified. Mouse-click and key-press semantics are very quirky. But let's not go overboard. Anybody who has experience with RPGs from circa 2000 knows that there's going to be a learning curve. It did not take me too long. Still, I admit that there were some important things I had no idea how to do until I looked them up in guides.
Indeed, you might be looking up guides a lot. I'm sure there are people who stubbornly finished this game without help, but doing so would require many hours of experimentation. The game inflates its length by the rather annoying tactic of not giving you enough information. For example, you're often sent on quests with no leads. It's up to you to keep exploring and keep talking again and again to all the NPCs until a clue comes up. Puzzles, too, can be maddeningly obtuse. You're expected to just guess and try various combinations of actions. These frustrations can be mitigated by looking up hints in a walktrhough, but I can understand if that would immediately turn people off of this game.
Arx Fatalis's magic system received a lot of praise, but that praise is overblown. Spells are a Dungeon Master-style combination of runes. You need to gather the runes and then learn the combinations. I love that part. But the controls are not so fun: you draw the runes with your mouse rather than clicking them. It's an innovative concept, and can lead to frantic and tense moments when you try to cast spells during combat, but ultimately it's frustrating. It's easy to get runes wrong and the whole scheme relies too much on your mouse-fu skills. I consider it a gimmick rather than a highlight.
The presentation is a mixed bag. Textures are so low-res and the color scheme is so compressed that very often I missed seeing important things in the environment. Characters and animations, though, are quite good (for 2002). The sound engineering is impressive, attentive to detail, and is an important component of the experience. Voice acting, however, is subpar. All in all it's just an unpolished mess that could really benefit from a remake.
In conclusion, Arx Fatalis is not the best RPG ever made. But if you are patient and not too put off by its flaws then there's a memorable experience to be had therein. It can be charming. It can be intense. It can be frustrating. And all its pieces come together to a coherent whole.
Final tip: Make sure to install the Arx Libertatis engine. It doesn't change the game. It just patches it to work on modern PCs and fixes some of the worst bugs and inconveniences.