What is it about “cosy” games that compels gamers? Real-world social interactions can feel high-stakes, exhausting, or fraught with conflict. Despite being more digitally connected than ever, modern society suffers from a massive loneliness epidemic. Real life isn’t what it used to be, and the modern day moves much faster than it did 15 years ago, let alone 25 years ago. Stressors are telescoping at a rate that has made day-to-day living an unrelenting battle.
It’s no surprise that “cosy” has emerged as a video game subgenre, as the act of “taking it easy” has been handed over to digital avatars, revealing a deep flaw in how modern society has shaped the human experience. Artis Impact explores the duality of what it means to find respite in the mundanities of simple life while also stressing over an impending AI armageddon in a post-apocalyptic dying world. No, this is not ripped from today’s headlines; it’s an indie JRPG that blends life-sim elements.
About 3,000 years in the future, after an AI-controlled robot army has wiped out most of humanity, society survives in small communities scattered across the wastelands amid the ruins of the world. Some places do alright and have managed to cling to a sense of conventional modern-day living in walled towns. The threats still exist, and A-Lith is a paramilitary resistance group dedicated to protecting the surviving remnants of humanity from rogue artificial intelligence. Artis Impact offers a wealth of stories, with plenty of optional plot threads to uncover through exploration and messing around. Its main narrative centres on Akane and her companion, Bot, as they set out to track down and secure Osmonium, an unstable core material triggering severe glitches and widespread aggression among rogue AI in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Artis Impact unfolds almost in an episodic format where events and beats freely flow into one another. It’s entirely on the player to seek out these events, and a large chunk of them are missable depending on the story’s progression and the time of day. On a personal level, Akane begins the game as a low-level mercenary with dreams of climbing the ranks of the A-Lith organisation. The story has her travel from town to town, taking on various odd jobs and community tasks, and working to prove her strength to her commanding officers. On top of that, there’s Akane’s quest for identity, recovering her own fragmented memories and discovering the origins of the AI revolution that nearly destroyed humanity.
NieR: Automata seems to be a clear influence, evident in A-Lith’s penchant for agents clad in sexy black, form-fitting outfits, with striking white hair and alabaster skin, while battling psychotic machines. Yet Akane is a bit of a buffoon when she isn’t wielding her sword like Sephiroth. At times, most of the side stories and optional events unfold comedically, and she comes off less like the cool and aloof 2B and more like Mr Bean. Whether she’s reviewing mattresses, being utterly humiliated during a job interview, or generally acting like a fool, it’s hard not to be endeared by the contrast of her otherworldly beauty and simple, childlike mentality.
It’s worth mentioning that there’s a “safe” mode that’s designed to shield players from some events that might be considered too harrowing to witness. This mode is utterly pointless. Artis Impact has nothing in it that might put off anybody. At worst, it depicts some schoolyard-level bullying that doesn’t amount to much and maybe mildly crass language. Nobody is going to have a heart attack or suffer from a mental breakdown from this game. It would be cool if Artis Impact went for broke and went nuts and held nothing back.
She’s an interesting character and is fun to watch, yet Akane is also relatable since she still needs to do menial work to fund her A-Lith assignments. Odd jobs can be anything from delivering pizzas, washing dishes, sweeping, selling lemonade, or even owning a business. The fact that she’s dressed like a hardcore goth girl the entire time makes the situations all the more absurd. Money makes the world go round. She needs to buy (sometimes find) food to improve her stats, get regular antibiotics to fight the arsenic infection from fighting robots, buy train tickets to travel, finance her weapon upgrades, and even saving costs money. The life-sim elements are fairly deep and thought out well enough that they make the game’s world feel more credible and immersive than the average JRPG.
When she isn’t having comedic escapades with a dwarf who wants to marry her, Akane’s main driving story has her plumbing dungeons and exploring wastelands. The dungeons are fairly straightforward for a JRPG, but are given a bit of flair by the game’s playful use of art styles and visuals. Artis Imapact‘s atmosphere does a lot of the heavy lifting, and the fact that there are tons of hidden items and chests everywhere with amusing flavour text helps keep the world interesting.
It always feels like there’s something new to discover. The only drawback to all these life-sim details is how they also make it too easy to break the game. Akane becomes obscenely overpowered once players are let loose to explore and do stuff, a stark contrast to the shockingly difficult early game.
Combat is deliberately simple and unfolds like a traditional JRPG but with only Akane playable and Bot acting independently depending on his loadout. The only problem with the battle system is how much information is withheld. The mechanics are barely explained, if at all, forcing players to guess or learn the hard way. Akane’s level caps need to be increased by buying her rank-ups, and most special effects when upgrading her swords are not defined at all. Artis Impact will quickly flash a box of text, and that’s all. There’s no appendix to reference to read further about how anything works. Even the arsenic mechanic is poorly explained and will leave ignorant gamers taking huge chunks of damage without knowing why.
Artis Impact is a diamond in the rough. It has a lot of great ideas, and most of them are executed fairly well, but the entire game is also bogged down in egregious technical issues. Somehow, the frame rate for this RPG Maker game is very poor. It’s all over the place, and there’s never a moment when it stays stable. It’s a shame, because the pixel art and animation are exceptional, and it feels bad to see them randomly chug while exploring. Optimisation needs work, and it’s got weird graphical bugs too. Sometimes Akane’s sprite will appear and disappear during scene transitions, or other sprites might hang. An update or two should be in order to get Artis Impact running the way it was intended.
The sound balance is also rough. The music is too soft and often hard to hear, while incidental sound effects are ridiculously loud. The mood shatters when, while wandering through an abandoned mall with soothing, melancholic music in the background, Akane’s deliberately cartoony yet deafening ladder-climbing sound suddenly crashes in, smashing the atmosphere like a sledgehammer to the face.
It’s too bad that Artis Impact is kind of buggy and poorly balanced because it has the makings of a legit indie classic. It has a unique visual style that relies on countless individual sketches to illustrate scenes. It’s very effective at conveying mood, and the artist has a wicked sense of comedic timing too. Some moments feel deeply personal to the developer, while other parts zero in on the everyday details of life that feel strikingly real.
