The game is played from a first-person perspective and is set on a world whose sun has failed, forcing the above-ground creatures to take refuge in caverns.

Arx Fatalis (Latin for "fatal fortress") is set on a world whose sun has failed, forcing the above-ground creatures to take refuge in caverns.

The player awakens inside a prison cell and, after making his escape, eventually discovers his mission is to subvert and imprison the God of Destruction, Akbaa, who is trying to manifest itself in Arx.

The main plot line is non-linear with the player collecting the various items to forge a sword required to defeat Akbaa in a final showdown.

Arx Fatalis was the first title of French developer Arkane Studios, founded in 1999 by the game's lead designer and CEO Raphaël Colantonio.

Arkane Studios have stated that Arx Fatalis was intended to be Ultima Underworld III;[9] however, while Raphaël Colantonio had support from Paul Neurath, one of the original developers of Ultima Underworld, Electronic Arts, who owned the rights, would not allow Arkane to make a sequel with their intellectual property unless he accepted some of their provisions.

[13] On 14 January 2011,[14] Arkane Studios released a 1.21 patch and the game's source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

[15][16] Based upon this source code, the Arx Libertatis project was formed to fix bugs and incompatibilities, and to port the game to operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and the OpenPandora handheld.

[citation needed] GameSpot's Greg Kasavin was pleased with the experience that the PC version offered, stating that "Arx Fatalis is entertaining and great looking, and it should especially appeal to fans of other atmospheric first-person games, including Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex, let alone this year's Morrowind.

Though marred by some technical issues (many of which have already been addressed by patches) and at times confusing to navigate in, Arx Fatalis nevertheless delivers a memorable, original role-playing experience",[36] and IGN's Dan Adams enjoyed the same PC version, stating that "The atmosphere, spell system, puzzles, voices, and story were good and interesting enough to give me a pretty enjoyable experience.

[48] The editors of Computer Gaming World wrote that Arx Fatalis "has hands-down the most annoying interface of the year, but fortunately, it also sports sharp graphics [...] and a great story".