Posted March 03, 2015
high rated
I tend to write these when a game really impresses me, right? Right. I wanted to write this for Grey Goo, but fuck it, Hand of Fate is on GOG. Let's do that then. Because Hand of Fate has impressed me, and extremely so.
So, do you know the feeling that most videogames lack, where you and your opponent sit across a table and try to beat each other at a board game of your choice? Series of moves and counter-moves that you each employ to beat the other, mocking and teasing one another constantly. Yeah. We got a game which, in its true genius, replicates that - I'll elaborate a fair bit more on this later, for now, I'll just say that I'm going to refer to your opponent as The Sorcerer. But the game is so much more than just that.
At its core, Hand of Fate is a collectible card game with bits of third person brawler and rogue-lite thrown into the mix. You get a randomly generated dungeon with individual tiles made out of encounter cards which you and the Sorcerer mix into an encouter deck and then you try to get trough these encounters towards a boss at the end. Yeah, the base principle is quite simple, but the game itself is anything but that - first of all, there is the encounter deck.
In the game's primary mode, Campaign, you get to build a deck of a set amount of cards from the card pool that you have unlocked. These are called encounter cards, and each of them abstractly represents a specific encounter you're going to get when you step on it, from obvious ones like "Shop" trough cards like "Ambush" which put you into a combat encounter to complex encounters like "Dark Carnival", which are little stories all by themselves and their outcome changes considerably based on 'rolls' you happen to make. Now this feels like the most important and involved part of the game. At first, you're just going to throw whatever in the encounter deck, usually based on which cards did you get as a reward for your last run to see what they do, but as the game's difficulty escalates (and believe me, it gets damn difficult for the second half), you will start catering your deck towards whatever you're going to be facing next. Does the next run have a special rule that you're less likely to get a successful roll? You take as few encounters based on chance as possible. Does it have specific enemies which require you to get specific weaponry? Well, you tweak your weapons deck (more on that later) to contain weapons against a specific kind of opponent and your encounter deck to increase your chances of getting such weapon.
And that's where all the game's complexities come in play. Its campaign works in form of 20 'boss' opponents which you slowly unlock by individually beating them, and every boss offers special rules for his entire dungeon. As already mentioned, one can decrease your chance of getting a successful random roll, another will draw a card from curse deck every time you purchase an item etc. These curses mean a considerable shift in game's rules for every individual boss encounter, and as the game's difficulty escalates, so does difficulty of every single encounter in game - in other words, even the already beat bosses get more powerful and their dungeons more difficult, which lends the game loads of replayability and challenges you to retry the previous dungeons with their rulesets using considerable higher difficulty.
Just so things aren't too simple (wouldn't want that, would we), there's also clear persistence between individual encounters of a dungeon - while your character gets reset between dungeons, for the duration of a dungeon, you get a set amount of health, food and equipment, which you can then expand using various encounters. This forces you to mix up your decks even further, putting in cards which can heal you, get you equipment or food. So, what's the health and equipment for? Aside from some encounters which can decrease your health right away and some equipment which can have effects on the dungeon 'crawling' experience itself, they're most important for the game's combat. And the combat is anything but what you'd expect of a card game. The Sorcerer draws cards from his monster deck, those dictate which opponents you're going to face, and then you get thrown into a relatively competent 3rd person brawler with your collected equipment in which you'll try to beat the drawn monsters. The combat is relatively good, mostly copying the counter-based combat system from Arkham games, which gets more complex as you and your opponents get more special abilities.
Oh right, I keep mentioning decks, so just a quick rundown of which ones to expect - as already mentioned, you yourself get to construct encounter deck, which dictates which challenges you're going to face, and equipment deck, from which you draw most of the useable equipment you get trough your adventures. The Sorcerer then gets a number of decks to use for or against you - there's a separate deck for curses, blessings, monsters, gains and losses (adds/detracts health, money, food, equipment etc.) The Sorcerer's cards are basically random effects some encounters can trigger, and get more severe in both negative and possitive manner as the game's difficulty escalates.
And then there's The Sorcerer. Now he's one of a kind, and I've never seen a character quite like him in any other game. He's an NPC which will guide and try to beat you troughout your adventures, in part an opponent and in part a sort of dungeon master and commentator. He has lines of unique dialogue for every single encounter and equipment cards you will find, offering anything from useful advice to cryptic comments, and slowly uncovers parts of lore and background of who he is and what the game you're playing is supposed to represent. In addition to extremely fun and addictive gameplay, addition of this character moves the game from the 'Great' territory into 'Excellent' - The Sorcerer ties everything together, offers an intriquing overarching story arc and gives everything a great deal of context. He even reacts to your actions, like commenting on you trying to game his game if you take specific combinations of cards or saying that he should nerf some positive cards. While his lines do repeat, he never got into annoying territory for me, and during every dungeon, he's either had some unique things to say, or just remained silent in case he's said his piece on the card you've encountered already. He tries to downplay your successes and to threaten your progress, yet at the same time he feels like a guide and observer - not necessarily trying to defeat you, often just trying to guide you.
The game does have some issues of course - a lot of what's happening is down to sheer luck, and while you can influence it considerably by constructing the proper deck for proper situations, it can still happen that The Sorcerer draws two boss monsters for a supposedly simple encounter card, game itself is not really designed for long sessions and should be played in short bursts and the combat system does get repetitive after a while. And the second half presents a massive difficulty spike. Just don't expect limitless appeal. Nonetheless, it's one of the picks for which I was willing to write a massive wall of text just for the chance of selling a few more copies so there's that. All in all, it's an excellent game and if you appreciate imaginative and new videogame concepts, go for it, especially if you're also a fan of board games.
So, do you know the feeling that most videogames lack, where you and your opponent sit across a table and try to beat each other at a board game of your choice? Series of moves and counter-moves that you each employ to beat the other, mocking and teasing one another constantly. Yeah. We got a game which, in its true genius, replicates that - I'll elaborate a fair bit more on this later, for now, I'll just say that I'm going to refer to your opponent as The Sorcerer. But the game is so much more than just that.
At its core, Hand of Fate is a collectible card game with bits of third person brawler and rogue-lite thrown into the mix. You get a randomly generated dungeon with individual tiles made out of encounter cards which you and the Sorcerer mix into an encouter deck and then you try to get trough these encounters towards a boss at the end. Yeah, the base principle is quite simple, but the game itself is anything but that - first of all, there is the encounter deck.
In the game's primary mode, Campaign, you get to build a deck of a set amount of cards from the card pool that you have unlocked. These are called encounter cards, and each of them abstractly represents a specific encounter you're going to get when you step on it, from obvious ones like "Shop" trough cards like "Ambush" which put you into a combat encounter to complex encounters like "Dark Carnival", which are little stories all by themselves and their outcome changes considerably based on 'rolls' you happen to make. Now this feels like the most important and involved part of the game. At first, you're just going to throw whatever in the encounter deck, usually based on which cards did you get as a reward for your last run to see what they do, but as the game's difficulty escalates (and believe me, it gets damn difficult for the second half), you will start catering your deck towards whatever you're going to be facing next. Does the next run have a special rule that you're less likely to get a successful roll? You take as few encounters based on chance as possible. Does it have specific enemies which require you to get specific weaponry? Well, you tweak your weapons deck (more on that later) to contain weapons against a specific kind of opponent and your encounter deck to increase your chances of getting such weapon.
And that's where all the game's complexities come in play. Its campaign works in form of 20 'boss' opponents which you slowly unlock by individually beating them, and every boss offers special rules for his entire dungeon. As already mentioned, one can decrease your chance of getting a successful random roll, another will draw a card from curse deck every time you purchase an item etc. These curses mean a considerable shift in game's rules for every individual boss encounter, and as the game's difficulty escalates, so does difficulty of every single encounter in game - in other words, even the already beat bosses get more powerful and their dungeons more difficult, which lends the game loads of replayability and challenges you to retry the previous dungeons with their rulesets using considerable higher difficulty.
Just so things aren't too simple (wouldn't want that, would we), there's also clear persistence between individual encounters of a dungeon - while your character gets reset between dungeons, for the duration of a dungeon, you get a set amount of health, food and equipment, which you can then expand using various encounters. This forces you to mix up your decks even further, putting in cards which can heal you, get you equipment or food. So, what's the health and equipment for? Aside from some encounters which can decrease your health right away and some equipment which can have effects on the dungeon 'crawling' experience itself, they're most important for the game's combat. And the combat is anything but what you'd expect of a card game. The Sorcerer draws cards from his monster deck, those dictate which opponents you're going to face, and then you get thrown into a relatively competent 3rd person brawler with your collected equipment in which you'll try to beat the drawn monsters. The combat is relatively good, mostly copying the counter-based combat system from Arkham games, which gets more complex as you and your opponents get more special abilities.
Oh right, I keep mentioning decks, so just a quick rundown of which ones to expect - as already mentioned, you yourself get to construct encounter deck, which dictates which challenges you're going to face, and equipment deck, from which you draw most of the useable equipment you get trough your adventures. The Sorcerer then gets a number of decks to use for or against you - there's a separate deck for curses, blessings, monsters, gains and losses (adds/detracts health, money, food, equipment etc.) The Sorcerer's cards are basically random effects some encounters can trigger, and get more severe in both negative and possitive manner as the game's difficulty escalates.
And then there's The Sorcerer. Now he's one of a kind, and I've never seen a character quite like him in any other game. He's an NPC which will guide and try to beat you troughout your adventures, in part an opponent and in part a sort of dungeon master and commentator. He has lines of unique dialogue for every single encounter and equipment cards you will find, offering anything from useful advice to cryptic comments, and slowly uncovers parts of lore and background of who he is and what the game you're playing is supposed to represent. In addition to extremely fun and addictive gameplay, addition of this character moves the game from the 'Great' territory into 'Excellent' - The Sorcerer ties everything together, offers an intriquing overarching story arc and gives everything a great deal of context. He even reacts to your actions, like commenting on you trying to game his game if you take specific combinations of cards or saying that he should nerf some positive cards. While his lines do repeat, he never got into annoying territory for me, and during every dungeon, he's either had some unique things to say, or just remained silent in case he's said his piece on the card you've encountered already. He tries to downplay your successes and to threaten your progress, yet at the same time he feels like a guide and observer - not necessarily trying to defeat you, often just trying to guide you.
The game does have some issues of course - a lot of what's happening is down to sheer luck, and while you can influence it considerably by constructing the proper deck for proper situations, it can still happen that The Sorcerer draws two boss monsters for a supposedly simple encounter card, game itself is not really designed for long sessions and should be played in short bursts and the combat system does get repetitive after a while. And the second half presents a massive difficulty spike. Just don't expect limitless appeal. Nonetheless, it's one of the picks for which I was willing to write a massive wall of text just for the chance of selling a few more copies so there's that. All in all, it's an excellent game and if you appreciate imaginative and new videogame concepts, go for it, especially if you're also a fan of board games.
