Hand of Fate

3/10

This is one of those highly entertaining games that don't have much to offer story-wise. Instead they feed from their simple, yet innovative gameplay. The setting is pretty straightforward. You play against a card dealer and have to defeat a series of boss monsters, each corresponding to either jack, queen or king of one of four suits. Dust is represented by barbarian type enemies, skulls are skeletons, plague toxic ratmen, and last but not least the fire breathing, armored lizard-like creatures called skulls. In order to find these bosses the player character has to move through a number of floors, which basically are pathways of face-down cards. Each time the player avatar steps onto one of these cards, it is revealed. While traversing said floor, the player must keep track of three things. Health, gold (to trigger certain quests or buy stuff) and food, which indicates how many moves a player can make before starting to lose health at each step due to starvation. Cards revealed this way can be enemy encounters, represented through a numbered card (two through six, if I remember correctly) of said enemy type. Or several cards. Sometimes there is combat (or any other event for that matter) straight away, sometimes you get an option, where you have to pick one of four cards that determine how you fare. These cards range from huge success to huge failure. Combat happens in real time in some kind of arena, where you hit, dodge, counter or deflect the attacks of your enemies. For me personally it was reminiscent of Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War. If you succeed, you are rewarded accordingly, either through looted equipment, or through gold, food, or increased health. Other types of cards that are in the mix are shops, where you can buy better equipment, heal wounds or buy food or blessings (enchantments that stay with you throughout the rest of the dungeon). Or it could be events. I'd divide this kind of cards into two groups. Single events and continuous ones. Single events are those that you can encounter each time anew. Helping a poor farmer or retrieving a weapon from the bottom of a ravine. In most cases, there's a risk and a reward. The continous events are ones, where one event is part of a series, thus by completing the encounter you get a token that unlocks the next one if you finish the dungeon. Finish is the keyword here. Even if you die, the token is yours and unlocks said next event card. So the next time you try your hand (pun intended) at a dungeon, your deck looks a little bit different. Unfortunately, this game is rather short, and the real challenge doesn't lie in the dungeon so much as in the combat part of the game, where you face off against ridiculously overwhelming enemies. In numbers or in strengh. Because the bosses you defeat have a small chance of appearing in the following encounters as regular enemy-type cards. So it's not uncommon that you get ambushed by a king of dust and a jack of skulls on your hunt for the queen of scales, for example. But while your enemies grow in strengh, your equipment is set back with each new encounter, up until you face the final boss...