Arco is one of 2024's quieter indie surprises. A tactical adventure with simultaneous-turn combat, distinctive pixel art, and an emotionally committed narrative about colonialism, family, and revenge in a fantasy-Mesoamerican setting. Nothing quite matches it, but several games share specific pieces of its appeal. This piece from the team at Tyrian Games covers ten alternatives and flags where HAWKER sits in the adjacent space.
TL;DR
- Arco (2024) is a pixel-art tactical adventure with simultaneous-turn combat and a narrative about colonialism in a fantasy-Mesoamerican setting.
- Closest matches include Into the Breach, Superhot, Sable, and Wildermyth.
- The simultaneous-turn combat is the game's most distinctive mechanic, shared only by Superhot and a few smaller indies.
- HAWKER sits adjacent rather than direct: shared commitment to specific cultural setting and emotionally committed narrative in a time-pressure frame.
- Arco is in HAWKER's Steam reference library; the tonal overlap is the reason.
The ten
1. Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018). Tactical turn-based with perfect-information combat. Not simultaneous-turn but structurally related in its commitment to tight tactical puzzles. Short runs, complex decisions.
2. Superhot (Superhot Team, 2016). The most famous simultaneous-turn-adjacent combat game. Time moves when you move. Different genre (FPS rather than tactical adventure) but the core temporal mechanic is directly related to Arco's.
3. Wildermyth (Worldwalker Games, 2019). Tactical RPG with procedurally generated character stories. Shares Arco's commitment to emotional narrative alongside tactical combat.
4. Sable (Shedworks, 2021). Different genre entirely but similar commitment to specific cultural setting and quiet emotional pacing. See our Sable piece.
5. Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019). No tactical combat, but the emotionally committed narrative in a specific cultural frame overlaps strongly with what Arco achieves.
6. HAWKER (Tyrian Games, September 2026). Our game. Grimdark shopkeeper roguelite, specific Breton-folklore setting, time-pressure narrative. Adjacent to Arco rather than direct but shares the commitment to specific cultural frame. Wishlist on Steam.
7. FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games, 2012). Real-time-with-pause rather than simultaneous-turn, but the "every action happens in the same moment" feel is adjacent.
8. Slay the Spire (Mega Crit, 2019). Different genre but similar attention to tactical decision-making in a constrained turn structure. Worth playing for anyone interested in how to make turns feel weighty.
9. Shadow Empire (VR Designs, 2020). Deep tactical turn-based with heavy narrative and setting commitment. More military-strategy than Arco but the cultural-specificity overlap is real.
10. Soup Pots (various, 2024). Smaller indie tactical adventure with similar pixel art sensibilities. Worth knowing for players exhausted of the major releases.
What Arco does that others don't
Four design choices that make Arco distinctive.
Simultaneous-turn combat. In Arco, you and your enemies plan your actions during a pause, then execute them simultaneously. This mechanic creates a specific tactical puzzle: you have to predict what the enemy will do and act in the same moment. It's closer to reading a chess position than executing a move. Few games use this mechanic, and Arco's execution is one of the cleanest available.
Committed cultural specificity. Arco's fantasy-Mesoamerican setting isn't generic. The art, the character designs, the narrative themes, the sound all commit to the specific cultural frame. This kind of commitment is rare in indie fantasy, which tends toward generic-medieval-European default.
Emotional narrative weight. The game is about revenge and family and loss, and it treats these themes with more gravity than most tactical-adventure games attempt. The combat sequences have emotional stakes, not just tactical ones.
Pixel art as artistic choice. Arco's pixel art isn't retro-nostalgia; it's a specific stylistic commitment to vibrant colour and expressive character silhouettes. The art does narrative work that more realistic styles would struggle with.
Where HAWKER sits adjacent
HAWKER isn't a tactical adventure and doesn't use simultaneous-turn combat. But the adjacency runs through shared design principles.
Cultural specificity. HAWKER commits to a specific Breton-folklore frame the way Arco commits to Mesoamerican-fantasy. Not generic-Celtic, specifically Breton. The commitment matters because generic settings can't carry the weight specific settings can.
Time pressure as narrative frame. Arco's combat runs on simultaneous-turn pressure. HAWKER's thirty-day clock runs on calendar pressure. Different mechanics, similar design principle: time as the thing the player has to reckon with.
Emotionally committed narrative in the setting. Both games treat their respective cultural frames as real rather than decorative. The narrative weight is grounded in the specificity.
Small-team indie production. Both games shipped from small teams with specific creative visions. Arco's four-person core team and HAWKER's team size are comparable. The commitment-over-scope approach is similar.
The simultaneous-turn category
Worth flagging that simultaneous-turn is an underused mechanic with specific design possibilities.
Predictive tactics. In turn-based games, you react to enemy moves. In simultaneous-turn, you predict them. The cognitive load is different, and in some ways more interesting.
Committed decisions. Once you lock in a turn, you can't adjust. This creates a specific kind of commitment that real-time and traditional turn-based don't match.
Information asymmetry. The game can hide enemy intentions while requiring you to act as if you knew them, creating uncertainty that's different from fog-of-war or hidden information.
Faster than traditional turn-based. Turns resolve simultaneously, so runs are shorter than in traditional turn-based tactics.
Games using the mechanic include Arco, Superhot (in a different form), Chess (functionally, since each player plans without seeing the other's intended move), and a handful of smaller indies. The design space is rich and largely untapped.
A first-hand Hawker design note
One of the specific Arco-adjacent design principles we've applied in HAWKER is the commitment to a specific cultural frame. We're Melbourne-based Australians, not Breton, and there's a legitimate question about whether we should be drawing on Breton folklore at all. Our answer has been to commit deeply rather than dabble. We hired consultants. We read Le Braz in French with the help of speakers. We tried to get the tradition right rather than sample it for aesthetic.
The same principle runs through Arco's approach to its setting. Franek and the team treated Mesoamerican fantasy as worth committing to rather than as texture to borrow. The result is a game that feels specific in a way generic fantasy can't.
We can't claim HAWKER matches Arco's cultural specificity. Our team's relationship to Brittany is less intimate than Arco's to Mesoamerica. But the principle is the same: if you're going to use a cultural frame, commit. The half-measures are worse than either full commitment or different choices. Players can tell.
Why players who loved Arco might love HAWKER
The recommendation isn't that HAWKER replaces Arco. They do different things. But the audience overlap is specific.
Players who responded to Arco's cultural commitment are likely to respond to HAWKER's. Players who liked Arco's emotional-narrative-in-tactical-frame approach may respond to HAWKER's emotional-narrative-in-roguelite-frame approach. Players who appreciated Arco's small-team specific-vision production are likely to appreciate HAWKER's similar ambition.
This isn't a large overlap. Arco is a niche game. HAWKER will be a niche game. But the overlapping audience is real and worth knowing about for both sets of players.
The indie categories neither of these games fits cleanly
A brief note on why both Arco and HAWKER are hard to categorise. Arco isn't quite tactical roguelite (no run structure), isn't quite narrative adventure (the tactics are load-bearing), isn't quite RPG (the character progression is minimal). HAWKER isn't quite shopkeeper roguelite (the setting is grimdark rather than cozy), isn't quite Soulslike (the combat is lighter than FromSoftware), isn't quite narrative roguelite (the shop is as important as the story).
Both games live at intersections of established categories. This is part of what makes them hard to market and easy to love. Players who find either game often find themselves describing it in terms of multiple adjacent categories. The positioning is awkward commercially but creatively honest.
FAQ
What is Arco?
A 2024 pixel-art tactical adventure with simultaneous-turn combat, set in a fantasy-Mesoamerican world. Released by a small development team led by Franek.
What are the best games like Arco?
Into the Breach for tactical depth. Superhot for simultaneous-turn adjacency. Wildermyth for narrative tactics. Sable for cultural-specificity. Disco Elysium for committed narrative in a specific frame.
Is HAWKER like Arco?
Adjacent rather than direct. Different genres but shared commitment to specific cultural setting, emotionally committed narrative, and small-team specific-vision production.
What makes Arco's combat special?
The simultaneous-turn system. You and enemies plan during a pause, then act in the same moment. The mechanic rewards prediction rather than reaction.
Is Arco short?
Yes. Main content runs roughly 8 to 15 hours. Not long by indie-adventure standards, but dense.
Does Arco have a sequel?
Not announced at the time of writing. The development team has been quiet publicly.
Spoiler wall
Everything above keeps to the demo-line framing for Hawker. The Breton cultural frame, the time-pressure structure, and the emotional narrative approach are all shown in the first seven days. Specific post-demo narrative beats sit behind this wall.
The broader tactical-adventure revival
Tactical adventures are having a quiet renaissance. Arco is part of a broader cluster of games in the 2022 to 2026 window that have reclaimed the form from its 1990s roots. Into the Breach reset the genre in 2018 by proving short-run tactics could carry AAA-level polish. Wildermyth expanded it by adding emergent narrative. Arco, Soup Pots, Shadow Empire and a handful of others have continued the movement by layering cultural specificity and emotional weight on top.
This matters for HAWKER because the adjacent audience overlap is real. Players who have bought deep into tactical-adventure as a category tend to care about the same three things HAWKER's audience cares about: deliberate mechanics, committed setting, and a willingness to be niche rather than broad. The genre boundaries are different, but the taste profile overlaps significantly.
We track this audience closely. Our wishlist conversion data shows a disproportionate overlap with people who own Into the Breach, Wildermyth, and FTL. It's smaller than our overlap with dark ARPG players, but it's higher quality. Players who cross categories tend to be more forgiving of specific oddities (like a thirty-day timer or a shop-combat hybrid) because they're already used to games that don't fit anywhere cleanly.
A note on small-team economics
Arco's development team is publicly credited as four people. HAWKER's team is comparable in size. Both games exist because a small group of people decided to ship something specific rather than something broad. This economic reality shapes everything about how the games look, feel, and reach audiences.
Small teams can't afford to serve the median indie player. They have to find the specific players whose tastes align with the specific thing the team wants to build. This is the opposite of the AAA model, which optimises for reach. It's also, in our experience, the only model that produces games with distinctive voices.
Arco is a good example of this economic logic working. The game isn't trying to be everything. It's trying to be specifically itself, for the specific audience that wants what it offers. HAWKER operates under the same constraints and the same ambitions. The ten games above are fellow travellers in this model, each of them built by teams small enough to have a specific voice.
Closing
Arco is one of 2024's most quietly distinctive indie releases. The ten games above each capture pieces of its appeal. HAWKER is adjacent through shared commitment to specific cultural framing and small-team specific-vision production, even though the mechanics differ significantly.
Next read: Games like Sable, or Games like Dave the Diver.