Fortune-499 is an odd game to try and describe. On first blush, it's a short, simple experience about a cursed fortune-teller in a world where magic is corporatized. She's about to be laid off ("there's no future in the future") in a way all too familiar to the IT professionals of the world.
That is, until a horde of demons invades the company for a hostile merger. Turns out, fortune telling is really good at fighting monsters not magically, but physically. It's like rock-paper-scissors. Literally.
That's a pretty good description of the game's plot, but it might mislead you into thinking it's something it's not. The game's mechanics are fairly simple. You are playing rock-paper-scissors (which I am going to refer to as RPS to save me some headache) except each round is a turn of combat. Whoever wins the game of RPS lands a blow on the other. Tie, and you both just hit each other instead.
Where the fortune telling comes in is your deck of cards. Drawing a card will increase the odds that the enemy will pick a specific option, allowing you to (semi) reliably predict what option to take. There's also the option to cast non-turn ending spells for minor effects, requiring you to draw MP from your deck to do so.
Gameplay takes the form of climbing different floors of the company, trying to clear them of monsters while engaging in these battles.
With that said, you would be forgiven for thinking this game is one of those deckbuilding roguelikes that's so... [i] en vogue [/i] these days. It feels like it should be, but it isn't. It's actually more a puzzle game. The floors are set, and most of them are less about the combat and more about solving some sort of larger mechanical headache. Combat will be required to do that, but half of the time you aren't really supposed to actually do a head-on fight. There's ways to modify your deck, and the ways in which you can do so are again 100% set in stone. There are intended solutions to each of the challenges presented to you, and most of the combat comes down to figuring out the specific sequence of events which accomplishes this.
I think the thing that really drives this home is the filing cabinets; accessing them allows you to move one card of your choice to the front of your deck, while ALSO showing you the order of your deck. You can use these things multiple times, so the vast majority of boss fights often come down to sequencing out your deck to win in a turn or two with the first 6 to 8 draws being known to you.
Which is fine, honestly. It's a fun puzzle! Once you start thinking of the game as that, it's quite fun. But it definetly feels like the mechanics were drafted for a different game. In particular, the fact that predictions aren't actually 100% liable does add some slight RNG into the mixture which... doesn't really add anything at all. You just sometimes fail a reasonable solution because your odds weren't 100%. And most of the time, the game gives you methods of 100% odds in the major boss fights. Sure, you get a pittance of additional money for losing a prediction that was weighted in your favor, but it barely matters when you often die and don't get to actually keep it. It is a sort of scoring system, but outside of that you can just spend it on basic upgrades that don't really change the game that much unless you *really* lean into a specific attack to break the HP scaling.
With all that said, I do like this game a lot. Where it shines is less in the gameplay but rather the characters and worldbuilding. It's a simple story told well, with each character getting a little bit of a moment to shine. I find them very well written; they're not the most complex, but there is a surprising amount of death for how simple the story is. There's plenty of well thought out humor that makes going through the slightly clunky gameplay worth it, and once you recalibrate your brain to meet the game on it's level, then it's absolutely worth a play.
For the price, it's about the length you'd expect (only a few hours, I've beaten it twice now), and it's a fairly compelling few hours. It's the type of game that gets me thinking, because it's mechanics are just begging for expansion in a fully fleshed out game. The fact that to my knowledge, no one has ripped this off to flesh out what's there despite it being almost 8 years old is honestly shocking.
