Imagine… a pen and paper RPG that you’ll need neither a pen, nor paper (nor friends for that matter), to play. This is Hand of Fate. The Kickstarter-funded title combines a collectible card game with elements of third-person action and a classic “choose-your-own-adventure” feel to create a blend that, surprisingly, delivers a rewarding experience with multi-faceted gameplay. More importantly, it scratches a major itch by feeling exactly like playing a good, old-fashioned match of Dungeons & Dragons with your own personal, virtual Game Master. It’s pretty good fun all around, honestly.
In Hand, you’ll spend almost the entirety of your time across the table from the Dealer, aka your dungeon master, your opponent, and your conversation partner. It’s seems almost like a really depressing game of poker. Candle wax drips languidly onto the table cloth; spiders scuttle across your peripheral vision; a deck of cards menacingly floats, waiting to be shuffled. No explicit guidance is given before the game just tosses you into the muck of things, starting with a thinly veiled tutorial match. But rest assured, everything becomes natural within a few rounds, a great achievement considering the overall depth and complexity of it all.
Each of the thirteen main story missions has a singular goal: seek out and kill the boss of the dungeon. What is really interesting here, though, is the way in which progression and exploration through the environment works. Cards are laid out, face-down, on the table in a sequence of winding pathways, each acting as a standalone location, battle or NPC encounter when the player interacts with them. These scenarios are lovingly narrated by the (rather brilliantly voiced) Dealer upon activation, often going far beyond the flavor of the text on the card to offer more story and background. Events are impressive, for the most part, making your journey actually feel like, well… a journey. Battle encounters, traps, shops, NPC conversations, and quests are all thrown into the mix here enabling some wonderfully emergent gameplay. Success or failure is dependent on your choices, resulting in either reward or pain cards – you can take a guess as to what each type does.
Food, as a finite resource, brings some much needed complication to progression, depleting each turn to either recover or drain health (depending on if you have any in your possession). One particular instance that comes to mind was after being chased out of town by a horde of hungry peasants, an NPC enters the fray. The Devil’s Choice – charming. Three enemy options appear, prompting to choose who you’d rather battle. Upon selecting what was clearly the easiest encounter, the Devil’s Choice announces, “Hmmm? You want the easy way out? Well then, you can fight both of the other two.” Brilliant. And you see things like this on the regular, leaving an air of uncertainty on the tough decisions.
As soon as a battle commences, the environment shifts to a 2D arena, cards are thrown down, and the player character, enemy mobs, and weapons just burst forth like some grim medieval episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! Combat in Hand is basic and reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum, with simple melee attacks and counters, alongside the occasional dodge roll making up your collection of moves. Special armor, weapons, and relics that can be obtained through exploration on the game board add slight depth and variation, but there’s nothing notable here. It’s all rather functional, but the clunkiness and lacking animations stifle the potential for any real fun to be had.
Even boss fights play out much in the same way: melee, melee, counter, melee, dodge, melee, counter, repeat. Traps often attempt to spice things up with various environmental hazards, but it generally just leads to the fight being forced into an awkward corner of the arena instead. While Hand does an acceptable job at improving pacing and breaking up the table-top segments, fighting often feels like a chore. It’s disappointing, considering how immersive things are over on the game board.
An element of deck building in between matches allows players to use cards acquired through gameplay in order to customize their potential equipment, and even slightly engineer the pool of possible encounters. The meat of Hand’s replay value comes in here because, aside from Endless Mode, trying out different encounters and setup combinations in order to progress through the unforgiving difficulty of the main battles is where most of your time will be spent. When the Dealer defeats you, and he will, often the solution is to simply remove one or two problem cards, replacing them with more familiar foes.
Whenever a game is completed, players are thrown back to the title screen with little warning. Lazy, but it kind of makes sense. Hand of Fate is an incredibly modular game, with matches lasting roughly 20 minutes and often feeling like a real table-top game – complete. It isn’t conducive at all to extend play sessions, though, preferring players to pop on for one or two matches at a time. Unfortunately, once you’ve experienced cards once or twice, they have absolutely nothing new to offer. It’s easy to predict what will happen when choices are made, and to position yourself in the best situations accordingly. Like most table-top games, it grates after a while.
Hand of Fate comes so close to being something really special – an unexpected concoction of genres and ideas that mesh together superbly to create a really fun experience that is both involving and rewarding – at least in short bursts. But, unfortunately, its potential is cut short by a lack of options and awkward third-person game segments that should really know better.
3 out of 5 stars
