What do you get when you mix a CCG, ARPG, and a frustrating helping of three-card Monte?
Normally it would be a mess, but in this case it somehow ended up being Hand of Fate and it's not too bad. If it weren’t for a fairly broad spectrum of small to mid-level annoyances in design, I’d have to brand it a landmark game in the realm of indies.
Really, what is this?
It’s actually pretty surprising how straightforward Hand of Fate is when you get in to it. It is very easy to avoid any of the more complex deck building processes if you want, and jump in to the game. You start out with a dealer explaining how these cards are a game and you’re playing it with your life and all that standard RPG buildup. What actually happens is that you have a deck of cards that represent all of the potential gear that you can get and all of the potential encounters you can come across. All of your encounters are shuffled together with the dealer’s additions (like shops and other more nefarious options) and laid out across the board as a path for your avatar to step across. Every step consumes food, which heals you, and running out of food causes you to lose health that persists between each encounter. When an encounter calls for a reward of equipment, it is pulled from your shuffled deck of equipment and can have things like armor, weapons, and artefacts (limited use spells) which you then throw on your character. Likewise, whenever an encounter hits you with food, gold, curses, blessings, or even combat, those options are again pulled randomly, but this time from a dealer-chosen deck. Some of the encounters involve choices the player makes, and can also require payment of your resources like food, gold or equipment. Others may have you picking “success” and “failure” cards shuffled three-card Monte style for an outcome. Many encounters combine these elements and often end up with you in combat, but that’s where everything changes.
In combat, you experience one of the weaker portions of the game. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it does share its design with the long line of games mimicking Arkham Asylum where the player essentially smashes the “attack” button while waiting for a green prompt to counter attack and a red one to get out of the way. What makes this less-than-stellar isn’t necessarily the concept, but the execution. The attack animations are limited and aside from triggering special weapon effects and artefacts, little else is required in combat other than timing things properly. Aside from that, hitboxes and visibility are two areas that could have used a lot more attention before release and fights vary greatly from painfully easy to seemingly very unfair. It looks, feels, and plays like an afterthought, but the game ends up relying heavily on it to keep the pacing up, so it ends up detracting from what is, as a whole, a good design.
The bumpy road to a disappointing end
Hand of Fate started strong, and I think there are many tasty meaty bits in the way that the stories play out through the cards. There’s some strong writing throughout and it’s the interactions with the encounter cards and the subsequent unlocks they create are well thought out. However there are several little problems (aside from my combat gripes) that made the latter portions of the game range from annoying to infuriating. The first thing that I noticed getting me fired up was how much things started feeling like they were beholden to a random number generator. The shuffling of success and failure cards gets far too fast to have any chance to follow, so that turns into a pure guessing game. That carries over into some encounters that halt all progress in their quest chain until you can somehow manage to luck your way into a card pick in your one chance to do so during each run. The second thing that plagued the end of the game was the massive ramp up in difficulty. I went through the vast majority of the levels without dying, but in the final few, I started being screwed over by combinations of limited resources, excessively bad curses, RNG not going my way, and of course having to use a clunky combat system against much tougher enemies. The final boss fight, not to spoil things, has you fighting a large number of very tough enemies consecutively, which is not like any previous portion of the game. In every other encounter, you fight the people on screen and then end and move on. The final fight has you fighting four whole waves without the benefit of healing in between. I generally don’t have an issue with games, in general, being difficult, but I do find it very frustrating when difficult spikes where it really doesn’t need to. I had to lower the difficulty level of the game to beat the final boss and I did it with literally one health point remaining. In addition, in finally accomplishing that, it didn’t count as far as the achievements are concerned - so somehow I have to fight all of the luck-based elements of that final level *and* beat the final boss for the game to really “count” it.
Even with all of that, I think the game wants you to focus more on the card encounters rather than the idea of getting to the end boss or overarching “story”. The vast majority of the writing exists within those chained quests between cards and that disparity is equally represented in the achievements. Only one of the 53 achievements has anything to do with beating the final boss. The “Endless Mode” option that sits below the “Story Mode” seems like the place to go to get the best experience out of the game and wash the taste of that nasty boss fight out of your mouth. It’s probably most telling that the achievement for that end boss fight has only been completed by 4.9% of the owners of the game.
Dealing with it
There were moments as I lost to that end boss maybe the eighth or ninth time that I considered maybe not recommending this game. It was a very trying time and not one I enjoyed in the least, but I really don’t think it’s fair to judge a game by such a small section. There were many enjoyable portions throughout my time playing and, if nothing else, I at least *saw* the ending – which is a very short and simple piece. What matters though is that the game is worth playing, especially now that it’s regularly on sale for a really affordable price. I think relegating yourself to an easy mode toward the end is probably fine – though I question the idea of stripping away the achievement for it when it has no text implying that the difficulty must be higher. It’s just clear to me that a standout indie title like this could have been so much more with just a little bit of care put in to resolving all of these relatively small issues that crippled the end of the game.
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What do you get when you mix a CCG, ARPG, and a frustrating helping of three-card Monte?
Normally it would be a mess, but in this case it somehow ended up being Hand of Fate and it's not too bad. If it weren’t for a fairly broad spectrum of small to mid-level annoyances in design, I’d have to brand it a landmark game in the realm of indies.
It’s actually pretty surprising how straightforward Hand of Fate is when you get in to it. It is very easy to avoid any of the more complex deck building processes if you want, and jump in to the game. You start out with a dealer explaining how these cards are a game and you’re playing it with your life and all that standard RPG buildup. What actually happens is that you have a deck of cards that represent all of the potential gear that you can get and all of the potential encounters you can come across. All of your encounters are shuffled together with the dealer’s additions (like shops and other more nefarious options) and laid out across the board as a path for your avatar to step across. Every step consumes food, which heals you, and running out of food causes you to lose health that persists between each encounter. When an encounter calls for a reward of equipment, it is pulled from your shuffled deck of equipment
Hand of Fate started strong, and I think there are many tasty meaty bits in the way that the stories play out through the cards. There’s some strong writing throughout and it’s the interactions with the encounter cards and the subsequent unlocks they create are well thought out. However there are several little problems (aside from my combat gripes) that made the latter portions of the game range from annoying to infuriating. The first thing that I noticed getting me fired up was how much things started feeling like they were beholden to a random number generator. The shuffling of success and failure cards gets far too fast to have any chance to follow, so that turns into a pure guessing game. That carries over into some encounters that halt all progress in their quest chain until you can somehow manage to luck your way into a card pick in your one chance to do so during each run. The second thing that plagued the end of the game was the massive ramp up in difficulty. I went through the vast majority of the levels without dying, but in the final few, I started being screwed over by combinations of limited resources, excessively bad curses, RNG not g123
Hand of Fate started strong, and I think there are many tasty meaty bits in the way that the stories play out through the cards. There’s some strong writing throughout and it’s the interactions with the encounter cards and the subsequent unlocks they create are well thought out. However there are several little problems (aside from my combat gripes) that made the latter portions of the game range from annoying to infuriating. The first thing that I noticed getting me fired up was how much things started feeling like they were beholden to a random number generator. The shuffling of success and failure cards gets far too fast to have any chance to follow, so that turns into a pure guessing game. That carries over into some encounters that halt all progress in their quest chain until you can somehow manage to luck your way into a card pick in your one chance to do so during each run. The second thing that plagued the end of the game was the massive ramp up in difficulty. I went through the vast majority of the levels without dying, but in the final few, I started being screwed over by combinations of limited resources, excessively bad curses, RNG not g
In combat, you experience one of the weaker portions of the game. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it does share its design with the long line of games mimicking Arkham Asylum where the player essentially smashes the “attack” button while waiting for a green prompt to counter attack and a red one to get out of the way. What makes this less-than-stellar isn’t necessarily the concept, but the execution. The attack animations are limited and aside from triggering special weapon effects and artefacts, little else is required in combat other than timing things properly. Aside from that, hitboxes and visibility are two areas that could have used a lot more attention before release and fights vary greatly from painfully easy to seemingly very unfair. It looks, feels, and plays like an afterthought, bsdsd
In combat, you experience one of the weaker portions of the game. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it does share its design with the long line of games mimicking Arkham Asylum where the player essentially smashes the “attack” button while waiting for a green prompt to counter attack and a red one to get out of the way. What makes this less-than-stellar isn’t necessarily the concept, but the execution. The attack animations are limited and aside from triggering special weapon effects and artefacts, little else is required in combat other than timing things properly. Aside from that, hitboxes and visibility are two areas that could have used a lot more attention before release and fights vary greatly from painfully easy to seemingly very unfair. It looks, feels, and plays like an afterthought, b
In combat, you experience one of the weaker portions of the game. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it does share its design with the long line of games mimicking Arkham Asylum where the player essentially smashes the “attack” button while waiting for a green prompt to counter attack and a red one to get out of the way. What makes this less-than-stellar isn’t necessarily the concept, but the execution. The attack animations are limited and aside from triggering special weapon effects and artefacts, little else is required in combat other than timing things properly. Aside from that, hitboxes and visibility are two areas that could have used a lot more attention before release and fights vary greatly from painfully easy to seemingly very unfair. It looks, feels, and plays like an afterthought, but the game ends up relying heavily on it to keep the pacing up, so it ends up detracting from what is, as a whole, a good design.
The bumpy road to a disappointing end