Hand of Fate

Hand of Fate is a fantastic rogue-like that mimics the experience of going through a D&D campaign. The game differentiates itself by having the player choose what enemies to face, what events to see and what equipment will appear. It's an interesting twist on the typical randomly generated dungeon because you get to pick your fate *no pun intended*. Unfortunately even after two years of its' release, Hand of Fate is still mired by buggy framerate and an extremely difficult end game.

Hand of Fate is a game where most of the action takes place in your imagination. There are no beautiful cut-scenes, no elaborate storylines and no memorable characters. Instead you're responsible for crafting the story on how you will defeat the Jack of Dust or the Queen of Scales, or another boss. Do you choose to construct a deck full of enemy encounters and fight your way to the end or try to play your luck with chance events?

While mentioning the chance events, I will make a poignant note that they are not purely random! Cards are splayed in front of you and shuffled Three Card Monte style (except it is with 4 cards). Sometimes you will get 3 success cards and 1 failure card, other times it will be the complete opposite. Depending on how well you can read the cards, the chances of getting a success is higher than you would expect. Personally with 3 success cards and 1 failure card in play, I got it right about 90% of the time.

In contrast to the rest of the game, enemy encounters feel like they belong in a different genre of game. The player is suddenly transported into a battle arena and you fight various enemies using Batman Arkham Asylum combat. I found the combat to be completely serviceable and not exceptionally complex given that it is not the main draw of the game. There is a basic attack, parry, stun, special move and magic spell. The combat can be hectic at times in later parts of the game where enemies will block your attacks or throw fireballs from afar.

I enjoyed my time with Hand of Fate but the bugs definitely soured my experience and limited my gaming sessions to about an hour. The main issue is the framerate. I have a moderately powerful video card that can run most games at a consistent 90+ FPS in medium settings. When I played Hand of Fate, the frame rate was choppy whenever there the game transitions from the card field to the battle arena. I also found that the frame rate tends to become more inconsistent the longer the game runs. This problem is especially bad after playing for almost 45 minutes, reaching the boss and experiencing sudden frame dips every 5-6 seconds. Other bugs that are concerning, are cut-scenes where the Dealer appears to be talking without audio or when there are subtitles on the screen that aren't synchronized with what the Dealer is saying.

Even without the bugs, Hand of Fate has a severe difficulty spike in the last act. I was forced to farm most of the tokens (roughly the equivalent of completing side-quests) to even come close to defeating the final boss on the regular difficulty. If you Google "Hand of Fate boss", there are multiple threads complaining and discussing how ludicrously unfair the final boss is. The difficulty comes from the curses that are unavoidable no matter how you build your deck. I was shocked to Google that the best strategy to defeat the final boss is to use a character only available in DLC.

Overall, I can recommend playing Hand of Fate, but maybe not finishing it (unless you like a challenge). The game has obvious flaws but still stands above its' rogue-like competitors for its' unique D&D inspired gameplay.