Arx Fatalis

- I think taking the magic route is the most fun. It's difficult at startup and you have to deal with the terrible UI for memorizing and casting spells but by early teens you'll be hovering, running really fast, throwing fireballs, slowing down time, summoning demons (or demonic chickens), and raising the dead. The best armor in the game can be found pretty early and it has really low strength requirements so I was a spell casting, heavy armored, sword wielding badass by the end.

- In one of the early dungeons you'll find something called an Akba stone or something to that affect. If you pick it up (and I recommend not doing so) DO NOT DROP IT!!! It's required to reach the final boss and it's otherwise a seemingly useless item that takes up a big chunk of inventory. If you discard it, you'll have to find it.

- There's a cavern early on with a shining forcefield and a dude patrolling within the forcefield (you'll know you're in the right area because a quest here involves rescuing someone from cultists). DO NOT DROP THE FORCEFIELD UNTIL YOU'RE READY TO DO SO!!! Inside is the final dungeon but more importantly there are two enemies patrolling here; a priest and a super fast guard. You'll likely miss the priest because he'll run away BUT HE HAS THE FINAL AKBA STONE. If you miss him, you'll have to hunt him down throughout the entire game world because NPCs can run between levels.

- [Arx Libertatis] makes it play nice on modern systems and fixes some bugs.

- If you're not going to be wizard enough to be able to cast Levitation yourself, be careful with levitation scrolls. You'll need it to reach some areas in the late game and some treasures earlier on.

- Everything will be a bit shaky at first until you make your way to the big human settlement and get a chance to stock up on supplies. Power through. It's not until you get there that you'll get reliable access to potionmaking, a wider range of spells, heavy armor, competent weapons of every type, and a broad range of consumables.

- Spellcasting is really funky until you understand it. It's not about making the glyph as the game shows it to you, it only cares about the corners. Your lines can be any length (shorter is faster and more reliable), you just have to pause a fraction of a second, and then start your next stroke at a clear angle to your last.

- There also several spells you can cast the game never directly tells you about. You can look them up, but you can also discover them by figuring out the grammar and meaning of the spell runes and extrapolating from there.