New Arc Line

Introduction

New Arc Line opens with a genuinely good pitch: a world where arcane magic and steampunk industry have been locked in an uneasy truce that's now collapsing, playable as a small party picking sides — or trying not to — between elves, dwarves, and monster-haunted wilderness on one side and zeppelins, tesla guns, and factory smoke on the other. Developer Dreamate and publisher Fulqrum Publishing launched it into Early Access on 26 November 2024, and its earliest reviews are full of a specific kind of enthusiasm: multiple detailed comparisons to Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and to Baldur's Gate 3, offered by reviewers who clearly know both well. Almost two years later, this review's full read of its most-helpful negative sample tells a very different story about where the project stands now than that launch-window excitement suggested.

What launch reviews actually praised

It's worth being specific about what New Arc Line got right, because the praise from November and December 2024 is detailed and consistent rather than generic. Reviewers single out the writing, the atmosphere, and the voice acting as genuinely strong, with one describing the game as "technically creaky... but a GOOD steampunk RPG" and another calling it "a surprisingly enjoyable Euro-jank party-based RPG" in the tradition of Larian's Original Sin games. The setting itself — the specific tension between magic and industry, rather than a generic fantasy backdrop — draws repeat praise as the most compelling part of what's there. Even the most positive of these reviews are careful to note the obvious limits of an Early Access launch: only two playable races, two classes, and what multiple reviewers independently describe as "just Act 1."

A patch history that stopped

Here is where the story turns. New Arc Line's own public announcement feed shows real, active Early Access support through its first eight months: a launch-week patch, a bugfixing update in January 2025, a development news post in February, a localization patch in April, an open beta announcement in May, and the "Smoke & Mirrors" content update that shipped 17 July 2025 with a hotfix twelve days later. Since that hotfix, the public record shows exactly four posts in over a year: an art-and-lore piece in December 2025 and three "Dev Diary" write-ups running through February 2026, none of which represent new playable content. As of this review, that's roughly thirteen months without a real content patch.

This isn't this review's inference — it's the specific, repeated conclusion of a large share of the negative sample, including some of the most-upvoted reviews the game has ever received. One review carrying 208 votes opens by describing a game that "lures you in with promises of a great story and world" before concluding "the devs just gave up." Others, independently and in their own words, describe the same timeline: no meaningful updates since around July 2025, dev diaries that stopped arriving, a Discord community server whose admin account was reportedly deleted. Several reviewers explicitly frame this as a trust problem rather than a technical one — money paid to support ongoing Early Access development, with the development conspicuously not continuing.

The AI-art question

One specific, widely-upvoted negative review (97 votes) makes a pointed claim: that New Arc Line uses undisclosed generative AI art. This review checked the store page specifically for Steam's required AI Generated Content Disclosure section and found none attached to the listing as of this check. That absence doesn't confirm the underlying claim one way or the other, but it's worth reporting plainly: if generative AI art is present in the shipped product, Steam's disclosure policy would normally require it to be stated on the store page, and no such statement currently appears there.

What the achievement data shows

New Arc Line's global achievement percentages tell a story consistent with everything above. The two earliest achievements, tied to the game's opening beats, sit at 68.0% and 59.5% of all owners — a healthy completion rate for an opening act. From there the numbers fall sharply: 31.0% for the next milestone, 25.9% after that, and the bulk of the achievement list sitting under 15%. That's the signature of a short, front-loaded experience rather than a broad one, matching the repeated description of the current build as "just Act 1" with limited playable content beyond it.

Final Verdict

The frustrating part of reviewing New Arc Line honestly is that the actual writing, world, and performances hold up — this isn't a review of a bad game, it's a review of what looks, by its own public record, like a stalled one. Launch-window players who compared it favourably to Arcanum and Baldur's Gate 3 weren't wrong about what was there; they just couldn't have known that the substantial content updates would stop thirteen months before this review was written, while dev diaries about "what's coming" kept arriving without anything to show for them. Genre fans curious about the setting should read the most recent reviews before buying, not the ones from November 2024 that still frame the Steam page's overall rating. At NZ$38.49 for what remains, by the reviews' own description, largely one act, this isn't a purchase this review can recommend until there's public evidence the project is moving again.