Arx Fatalis

An underground role-playing world

Arx Fatalis takes place after the sun has failed and its inhabitants have moved underground. Its first-person role-playing combines exploration, conversations, puzzles and character development with weapons, stealth and magic. Spells use drawn runes, making the act of casting part of the game's interaction rather than only a choice from a spell list.

The original game encourages different approaches through character skills and equipment. Those possibilities describe Arx Fatalis as a whole; the browser project's hosted demo supplies a smaller introduction to that world.

Arkane · Arx Fatalis publisher description

Arx Libertatis brought to the web

Arxwasm adapts Arx Libertatis, the open-source engine project for Arx Fatalis, to WebAssembly. The hosted launch uses demo data, with a download of roughly 150 MB that is cached for later visits. It is an engine demonstration you can enter from a browser, rather than a distribution of the full retail game.

Use a current desktop browser for the intended input experience. The creator lists Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge; the fact that the engine can run on a mobile device does not supply a playable touch interface.

Arxwasm · creator setup and limitations

Switch between looking, fighting and magic

Right-click switches between the cursor and mouse-look. Tab changes combat mode, Ctrl activates magic mode, Enter equips an object and Home opens the menu. Learning those switches helps explain the game's rhythm: interacting with the world, fighting and drawing magic do not all use the same pointer behavior.

Saves use browser storage, so use a normal profile when you want persistent progress. Private browsing can prevent saves from being retained. The cached download and saved progress belong to the browser's local storage, not an automatically synchronized account.

Arxwasm · creator setup and limitations

A demo with renderer differences

The creator documents missing effects, including some magic visuals and fog. Keep that in mind when comparing the web demo with native Arx Fatalis or Arx Libertatis. The browser build's presentation and touch limitations are specific to this experiment.

Arxwasm · creator setup and limitations