Hand of Fate Review:
Deal Me Death, Please

This is a game where it can actually be fun to die.

Don't get me wrong: death will happen, and sometimes, your death will come for you at really frustrating moments. Sometimes, you'll die when you were so close to killing the final foes in the maze of scenarios laid out before you. Sometimes, you will simply become too lost, and supplies will run low, starvation coming for your avatar before you can find the end. In fact, both of these types of deaths will probably happen a lot to you. However, if on your journey you had managed to come across a new card, collecting the essence of it for your personal deck of fortunes? Death just became a chance to collect your thoughts, rethink your options for items and adventure, and ask the fortune teller that's trying to kill you to deal you back in again.

Sit down, pick your favorite cards, and ready your axe hand...Welcome to Hand of Fate.

A game that's been in early access for almost a year, Hand of Fate has just fully published the game yesterday, and man, they waited until this game was a polished gem. Smoother graphics, combat made more engaging and active, and cards...so, so many cards. So many ways to make the game both challenge and reward you all at once.

Allow me to explain the basics of game premise: you sit in front of a fortune teller. Except, he's not a regular fortune teller... which he likes to remind you occasionally while he tries to kill you. No, this man is here to help fortune seekers like you play 'the game'. What is this game? What's the prize? Again, it's sort of a mystery, one that sometimes, the Dealer will start talking to you about: the different sorts of people that have come to sit before him, to try and fail and die. This is a rogue-like in many ways, but what sets it apart is the style and premise that's been built up around the 'try, try again' mentality that so many of these games carry with them.

There's a box of cards, on your side of the table - a box of the cards you own, that are part of you. It also contains a set of foes to vanquish, trials to conquer while you search for fame and fortune. It's no small secret that the deck of foes you fight through is loosely based on the Tarot deck, and because of this, there are four suits of foes: Dust, Bones, Plague, and Scales. There are Jacks, Queens, and Kings of each suit, and as you play through the story, there are twelve different 'decks' to fight through, with one of these royals as their leader. Each has a miniature story, told by this dealer as you fight through the deck.

I think I've mentioned this, but yes, you fight. A lot. You fight, and you suffer, and you butcher the six of plagues right next to the four of bones. That's suddenly ten enemies that spawn and charge you all at once, the music switching from ominous to energetic as the battle breaks out. Suddenly, its over, and based on the Dealer's card, you might get a reward, you might not. Moving onto the next card in your fortune, you might be whisked away to a sand-blown desert ruin, three bandits attacking and throwing daggers at you (the Three of Dust card, specifically). Perhaps you end up meeting a stranger with fangs, who promises you much needed money for your trouble if you just give him a little bit to drink. Maybe it's a treasure chest from a cavern, but you have to run through a torchlight maze of traps to get to that prize.

Ah, treasure: the flip side to any good fantasy game. The reason you slog through the mire in the first place, right? To get that shiny new sword, or the armor made entirely of magic silver? Well, you can equip your new shiny for the rest of that adventure, for sure, but it isn't over just yet. Defeating cards with a little symbol at the bottom of them unlocks new cards: sometimes these can be dangerous encounters, or other times bits of treasure. When you go into play against a story villain, you build a deck, which includes both a list of your unlocked encounters and much needed equipment. You don't simply get to start off with all that good gear, but instead have to find your way through the play-through of whatever encounters you have put in...which could be easy, hard, or a mixture in between. The way this game handles variety is genius, making it a deck building game that isn't entirely under your control.

Hand of Fate is game of risk/reward, where you can unlock better and cooler items, but only by playing through encounters you may have never seen before. You don't know what they do...or perhaps, you have played through them, and know they are absolutely miserable and difficult - but you really, really want to unlock that token, permanently giving you a chance to get a better item, as well as the ability to perhaps find new adventures and encounters later. Of course, trying these games of chance might permanently reduce your health total for the round, or make you lose some of those same precious tools you need to keep advancing through to the next card. Do you want to unlock more cards, or do you want to win as quickly as possible with what equipment you have in front of you?

Variety is one of the catch phrases that really nails this game. By the time you're on the sixth story mission, the cards on the table and in your own possession can be are entirely different. There are more foes and enemies that are released into the game, each creating more nuanced combat. Speaking of, we haven't even touched the other core part of the game: how damned fun the fighting can be. The action revealed through the cards are fantastic amounts of fun. Take the combat of Batman: Arkham City as a good starting point, where you are a scrapper that leaps between combatants, counters, spins, and sometimes using high powered weapons and artifacts to turn the tide in your favor. It can be difficult if you've been dealt a high amount of enemies, or sometimes therapeutic when you have managed to grab your favorite weapon and magic artifacts to face down those ratmen...one way or another though, the combat has always felt thrilling and engaging.

One of the coolest things about the combat is how the situation changes. One combat finishes, and within three minutes, you could be fighting an entirely different set of foes, in entirely different circumstances. Each card is its own miniature tale, whether the context is being ambushed in the forest by bandits or being trapped in an overgrown jungle arena filled with lizard-men. Normally, I'm someone that enjoys a solid, coherent story, but most of the charm of this game lies in its ambiguity. Why are you in this destroyed temple, talking to an obviously creepy magic-maker like the Dealer? Are the enemies you fight just projections? Is that new card you just defeated going to unlock a new holy sword for you to wield later? Or have you dug a little too deep, creating a new monster that will hound you for the countless more times you sit down to play?

Hand of Fate is simply just a good game, and it's a game that proves what player support can do for a small development studio. After a successful kickstarter and the help of early access purchases, a game that could have just been a gimmick now is something that is fun, polished, and uniquely addicting. It's awesome knowing there's still a ton of cards I haven't experienced yet out there, even after getting to the end of the story mode. It's a wonderful feeling when the Dealer taunts me in a new interesting way, his narration equal parts begrudging compliments and mocking spite. The developers were able to add an Endless Mode before release on top of all this, and that's a rabbit hole that just infinity expands on the feeling of variety and unknown exploration you get as you play through level after level of the Dealer's card spreads. There is so much to do here, and so much to explore. How many times you have to die to find it all, well... that's up to you, and a little bit of luck.

Speaking of, when I started writing this article, I was pretty happy with getting into the top fifty on the Steam leaderboard for Endless Mode. I should probably go back and see what new dangers I can find; see if I can get the cards in my favor for yet a higher score. I haven't unlocked every single card in the game yet, not even after fifteen hours, and I'll gladly endure a few more deaths until I've earned every prize that I can.