Serin Fate

I’m conflicted about whether to give this game a recommendation or not. It keeps the core elements of a beloved, over-saturated genre, but makes a real effort to mix things up, coming up with some ideas I hadn’t seen implemented before in this type of game and which I really liked. On the other hand, there are just a host of aspects which absolutely decimated my enjoyment, and compounded to make this a frequently infuriating experience. The primary cause of both sides of this sweet-and-stanky dichotomy is a design ethos with two core tenets: 1) as much as possible, find tweaks or entirely new mechanics and systems to replace all the aspects of the genre which players are (over)familiar with, and 2) as much as possible, make the player “discover” everything for themselves – to the extent of usually not explaining how any of these systems operate, or how to engage with them, or sometimes to even give any hint that they exist. It is not hard to understand why this often produces wildly frustrating results. It is so clear to see how the dev started out with “I hate the fact that so many games feel so similar to play! I love it when I have to work things out in games through exploration and experimentation!” and then unintentionally created something in which it feels like everything, from the tiniest details up to fundamental game systems, is needlessly opaque despite being unintuitive and often contrived. On top of that, we have the commonplace (and to a large extent forgivable) lack of polish from a solo indie dev with limited experience. So, while you’re fighting your way through all the previously mentioned issues, you also have to contend with an added layer of friction from very poor UX, and several clunky and unbalanced gameplay elements. Exacerbated by this lack of polish, combat really falls flat, feeling extremely dull and repetitive. It’s a shame, because if the chimera mechanics were just a little more coherent and involved, it would help the game as a whole to feel much more engaging. All that is not to say there is nothing to enjoy here. In particular, using magic just for utility spells actually works really well, and I loved replacing the grunt-work of mining and chopping with sending out a flank of ethereal, conjured tools to do the work for you. It’s also very satisfying that they continue to work regardless of your presence, so you can wander off to deal with other business, and return later to reap the spoils of their work. I wish that I could just appreciate the other original little details like this, instead of having the whole experience spoiled by the overarching flaws. I should also point out that my recorded playtime isn’t a remotely accurate reflection of how much I actually got out of the game. I would routinely leave the game running in the background while I went off to scour Steam guides / Discord / YouTube for information about something which they didn’t explain in the game, and considering the frequency with which that happened, that idle time really mounts up. Not to mention the several times when I would lose motivation midway through this process, and just wander away from the computer in search of reinvigorating snacks. Or sleep.

S-TLDR: I suggest you look elsewhere and not get your hopes up. This game is disappointing, buggy, and the dev is vindictive and condescending towards anyone who doesn't thumbs up the game no matter the reason. They abandoned it after launch to work on @SoulCrestRPG, that is also forgotten; it's .com is for sale. lol TLDR: You want to buy this game because it looks like Pokemon mixed with Zelda and Stardew. You'll be disappointed, confused on what you're supposed to do even 40 hours in [unless you want to follow a guide word by word], and soon find out that this game isn't "hard". After all, your attacks auto-target with the staff even if you're facing away from the mob--one of only two weapon types--and more so you're expected to grind for hours between the unbalanced game system. After a few soft locks, crashes, bugs, you'll slowly find unfinished story lines. Then if you happen to dislike the game, you'll be insulted and stalked by the dev and a few of their fans. You'll be called names, have them try to get your Steam account closed, be called a liar, dense, victim, etc. [b]6th Edit: wow...now trying to falsely report me for buying their game legally, within Steam's ToS. All because I left a bad review. Wooow. Sure makes you want to buy their game, huh? The [u]ONLY comment I deleted was insults by a single mod from their discord.[/u] If you see the other negative reviews, you'll understand why I disabled comments. [u]The dev made it so I couldn't reply to comments before I disabled them anyways, so why have them? Just so I can be called names for wishing a game wasn't full of crashes, bugs, soft locks, abandoned/unfinished content, etc..? Nah...[/u] 5 Edited reply[/b] to dev: I am not playing victim? Why the name calling? Again? All I did was ask if a major bug would be fixed or soft locks and was told the game would never be updated because it is a house of cards. I am allowed to make a negative review if I feel a game fits it. I am not "two-faced" or "disgusting" for thinking a game would be amazing if it wasn't ... ugh ... just ... wow. I never spammed their discord? ...wow... I'm done defending myself. My review stands. Everyone who considers buying this: Please look at how the dev and a handful of people repeatedly attack anyone who leaves a bad review. Look at how we are all called dense, trolls, that we are playing victim... [b]Edit 4 [/b] Reply to the Dev's new response: Other reviews speak of how this game was abandoned they day it was launched. The bugs found at launch will never be fixed. The game will never be completed. They speak the truth. There are achievements that you are unable to complete. [b]There are also basic promises from the KS that have been forgotten (where is the boat workshop? Home customization? Chirmera dungeon?)[/b] Look at the dev's responses and the comments from the discord mods and you'll see that this is a game made by toxic people you will not want to support :( ...this is why I took screenshots prior to my initial review, because of their history of this sort of treatment. The bugs that I found and spoken up about on Disc? Not mentioned in the dev's reply. There are some forum threads left of the dev and the small set of "discord mods" that have made it clear this type of treatment towards even the slightest negative opinion is normal. Sigh... [b]Edit 3:[/b] I had to disable comments. [b]Edit 2:[/b] Huh, looks like I was banned from the community discussion and review comments for simply wishing this game wasn't abandoned when launched. Wow. [b]1st Update[/b]: Now that server mod mod made a comment with name calling and misinformation in the replies. There are plenty of negative reviews that have pages of attacks by a handful of people. I do not wish for that to happen here as well. That should say enough about the game. [h1]Do not buy. [b]Original review: 80 hours in Nothing will ever change or be updated: not the soft-locks, not the bugs, not the crashes. It is still missing multiple aspects promised in the original Kickstarter.[/b][/h1] The developer claims they can’t use older versions of Game Maker, even though they absolutely can. Don’t bother with the Discord. You can be polite and still get insulted or blocked by the same “white knights” who don’t want anyone suggesting the artist that made this game could fix things. They’ll defend every flaw and attack anyone who tries to help. The saddest part? [b]The developer themselves described the game as a “house of cards”. That if they so much tried to fix/finish it, it would all fall apart.[/b] It’s a shame, because the game has concepts. I just wish it was finished. Apparently, that makes me “dense,” according to the Discord mods. You will be soft-locked. You will face challenges that make no sense in terms of time or effort. You’ll be expected to rely on guides instead of discovering things naturally. And if you mention it, the Discord mods will mock you for not “beating the game so hard it crashed.” If you love the game and wish it continued, you’ll be ridiculed. If you call out a soft-lock, they’ll make excuses; insisting some random loading screen hint you couldn’t possibly connect means it’s your fault. Still, I love it. I’ll finish it as is. It’s just tragic that the developer sees their own creation as too unstable to touch; a fragile house of cards frozen in time. It will always be broken, unbalanced, and unfinished; not because it has to be, but because the developer refuses to try. ─ [b]Adding Update 7 here: [/b]This is the dev's original reply. Vethergen [developer] Posted: Oct 27 @ 5:14pm You joined the discord asking me and other players questions, which I casually gave you response, and detailed why this game will not be updated 5 years after its release -- which you've since chosen to cherry pick (what I thought was our nice conversation) to make it some weird political collateral, stating "you're taking photos". Then sometime while I was away, you started aggressively trolling and calling other players (only one of which was a mod, as you stated, who disagreed with you and who tried to answer your questions) "little white knights". You can pretend to be a victim now, but that sort of two-faced ingenuine/toxic behavior is not tolerated in the SF discord, and is frankly repulsive - you are banned (along with the secondary/spam account that is also yours). The discord has 1300 members and I've now banned 3 over the course of 7 years. --- That aside To any folks who might be reading: Completing the game is not soft-locked. A few collectable items (that are in no way necessary to progress, and that the fuss above was actually about..) can be unfortunately barred if a particular order of events happens - tho it is rare; this is not by design and is an oversight, you have my apologies! Furthermore, the game received content updates, QOL, and bug fixes for months before and after release to make it the best experience I could with the skills I had at the time. Some folks have said "it's incomplete!" but havent really detailed what that means? I assume they just wanted more or felt the pacing was wrong... Which is fine and fair. That said, it was not abandoned--It is a complete game with a sprawling adventure across the world, filled with quests, cutscenes, bosses, a final boss, and ending cutscene & credits. Is the game perfect? No. Is it a game that was made with a lot of love and that most people seem to enjoy despite its flaws? Yup!" [b] The "trolling" they speak of is pasting my review in Discord's general chat in case anyone wanted to discuss. Dev claims I had a _second_ account that was silent AND spammy? THREE? Pick one, lol. I called the white knight a "white knight" early on, before the Dev spoke in Discord. They had defended bugs with misinformation about settings/blaming/excuses/insults/bragging about crashing the game/etc. The dev had no problem with me til my review. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯[/b]

After playing the story to completion, I can't really recommend it. It has so much promise, but it doesn't really deliver. The story pacing is very unsatisfying, coming to an abrupt and unsatisfactory end. The punishing difficulty is actually really fun as a change of pace to more chill games like Stardew Valley (providing you know to expect it) but in conjunction with a lack of auto-saving and frequent crashes, it becomes very unreliable and frustrating. It also becomes very grindy in the mid-section, and not in a fun a way. I loved the art style and world-building, and I wanted to love this so much more, but ultimately it was not a satisfying experience.

This game looks like the typical indie game that tried to mash together too much ideas, genres and concepts. But it just works. Don't expect much polish on it, but what truly matters is definitely there. This game really has its own tropes, which is a rarity nowadays (but might confuse even seasoned gamers though). If you have a common interest in farming-sims, creature collection and mild adventure/rpg with cryptic but rewarding world building and progression, you might actually enjoy it much more than many better polished games. This definitely feels like the dev's made their dream game and poured all the passion and soul they could in it.

After some back and forth with the developer, I'm gonna give this review another shot. I think I might have been a little harsh previously. It doesn't change my experience with the game, but if you're on the fence about it and you need your next Stardew fix, this will help you decide if the game is for you. So first off, as far as I can tell, this entire game was built by one person and it was their first major project. On that laurel alone, this game is an impressive feat. The scope was ambitious and, in spite of it's shortcomings, it does manage to be a complete game. Serin Fate has charm and polish. There are people who adore this game, but I think most of them didn't finish it. Deep knowledge of this game will get you far. In short, the game tried to be stardew, kings quest, pokemon, and Link to the Past, all at once. It did the Stardew thing okay, but at some point, the game devolves into a tedious resource grind. Multiply this by dozens if you're going for some of the harder achievements. If you'll look, there are some hardmode ones that far less than .3% of players have managed to accomplish. I'm going to warn you right now, if you came into this hoping you could spend 30-60 hours to get a Stardew 100% (like I did), you can turn your ass right around and play something else in the Farming Humble Bundle you got. This game is BRUTAL on hardmode; muscling your way through it is not an option. You can expect long grinds and ignoble deaths to days-long playthroughs. I walked away with a bruised ego realizing I couldn't will myself to overcome this. Coming from a guy who beat Darkest Dungeon on hardmode and Triple Crown Victory in Pillars of Eternity, I don't recommend even trying this in Serin Fate. You'll part with in on bad terms (like I did), and the game has enough going for it that it deserves engagement without the 100% mandate. Enjoy it for what it is until you can't, and let it go when that happens. There's a pretty good walkthrough in steam guides if you ever get stuck, and get stuck you will. Many progress points make sense once solved, but the solutions are unintuitive. Don't try to figure it out on your own, if you get stuck for more than an hour, just read the guide so you can move on. I promise you: it won't be cheating; part of old adventure games was talking to your friends about what to do next. A lot of the developers explanations as to his design philosophy, and why many of the problems are not fixable anymore, are indicative of a project long past its development cycle due to burnout, feature creep, and unwieldy scope. I can relate; after a years of grinding on a single project, there comes a point when one can no longer meaningfully grapple with it's problems without fresh eyes and dedicated teamwork, and that's even if you manage to build the game from a working concept that doesn't fall into design ruts that can't be altered without an overhaul of the core mechanics. The developer acknowledges these faults. That's respectable. The game is respectable; perhaps it was I who didn't respect it, than it who didn't respect my time. It can be both.

A difficult game with lots of mechanics, cute art style, and minimum hand-holding, that can take a bit of time to learn but is very pleasant to play once you know what you are doing. The final boss named Spined Ling is incredible.

I spent two hours playing, and I still can't figure out what is the main game loop of Serin Fate. Maybe it gots better later, but for now - gosh that game is a mess.

No, i had fun with the game but this isn't a game i would recommend to my friends or other people play it, basically. Serin Fate is a duck, an ambitious duck: tries to swin like Pokemon-like games in creatures raising and battling, to walk like the adventure and RPG features of games like Zelda series and to fly like Stardew Valley in the farm simulator and town relationships; all that with a touch of witchery (and necromancy). Being a duck isn't the problem here, actually, is a good idea, the issue here is that the duck here isn't a good duck after all, in my vision. Basically, for every single cool or good idea or part of the game there is bad or miss handled counterside that i could say. This feels like the developer keeped adding and adding things to here without thinking how connect all that in a well way, he says that this isn't a polished, smooth game in the 'about game" section so i think this is the case. This game is another example of complicated, not complex design that feels so commom these days. Yes, make a complex design that interconnects very well a great number of elements is real hard, but here the complicated part just drop off hard, and that is the main trouble. To me atleast, the game starts really well in the terms of hype because of the various interesting features, because of the mystery of how the things gonna be and the fast learning of a very few features. Then, after getting lost and lost and finally discovering the things by yourself or getting some guide in the internet (because explations here are pooly explained initially and gather information after its start is really hard to connect), that initial mystery which was full of expectatives is faded away and what last is a mall performed game with lack of coesive game design, full of unecessally grind and full cool ideas underperformed and poorly explored. Serin Fate feels more like a proof of concept than a real produt, and this and all other things commented above are more or less explained by the developer notes in the store "about game" section. With that in mind, the game strong points should be his systems and features, but i don't even thint that they're too good or like that. The systems we got always feel incomplete, there could have more, much more in every areas. The combat is just gank and gank with exponentially increasing numbers; necromancy is just a couple of buff with a limited time duration and skeleton summons who trivializes the already badly performed battles; witcheries work just as an substitute to farm weapons, feartilizer effects and capture chimeras by random small chances most of the time; the casting system is really cool but is not developted besides his existence; the system of the chimeras is really poorly explained and becomes just a farm of blue coins (magatamas actually) and a free dps because players won't know what to do, how to do and why to do all things, the characters mostly fail in being charismactics, town's people are nothing and the 4 highlighted ones just feel... shallow, lacks substance (especially in moments who should be important like the turtle adventure or last battle), the perk tree idea is great to just get overwhelmed by the level grind and questionable game stuck moments like minerallogy II, a bad execution after all; and so much on... The worst to me is: this could just be a awesome indie game, having some minors here or there, with the concepts already estabilished in the game. It was just needed more development time, six months or even one year, to polish the thighs, to adjust the pacing, to explain more the features that aready have or even reducing the scope. Minor adjustments in the UX (User Experience), minor add of some elements to connect things could make this a fine product, i think. As the game is, it's a case of good ideas, bad execution. But i think it's an awesome template and experience for an amazing game in the future, there is much to explore off in a wizardry tematic farm simulator with a mix of adventure RPG, however, if you are searching for that, go lost yourself in Rune Factory which will offer you a more rounded game experience than a proof of concept like this (until Serin Another Fate be released, that will be absolute gaming).

I was really conflicted thinking of whether to recommend this game or not, but I think in terms of what I consider to be a 'good' game vs 'bad' game and decided that this is ultimately not worth getting into. First big gripe with this game: The developer tells you outright that there is no real tutorials or hand holding and you basically just need to figure out things on your own. I'm perfectly fine with that, in fact, I normally prefer it. However, if this is your approach, your game NEEDS to be intuitive. I'll give a few examples of how counter intuitive this game is: There are key items in the game that blend in too easily with the background and you can miss it completely. In most games, when you get past a dungeon or find a secret path, there's usually a big open space and in the center is the key item to grab. In this game, it literally blends in with the environment so well that I can't tell if it's decor or a key item. I had to read through guides to figure out where Geez's hat was. As it turns out, I passed it many times because when I was in the area for it, I thought it was just decor or something because there was so much garbage on the map, it blended right in. Same with the rope and shovel. At least highlight key interact-able items. This goes hand in hand with the previous issue: the puzzles are horribly designed (if you can call them puzzles?). Some areas are hidden or seem inaccessible, which is fine, a part of exploration and adventuring is discovering how to get there. However, the way this game is executed is awful. Like I mentioned in the paragraph above, everything seems to blend in. To access some areas, you have to interact with a hole in the wall. And to me, that's not a puzzle....it's just a 'GOTCHA! It was there all along! - kind of thing, which is lazy game design. The little hole in the wall literally just looks like decor because rocks and crevices have texture so I just assumed that it was a part of the pixel art. The pacing of the game relies on getting certain resources but does not even inform you about how to get to that step. There is a blue coin currency that you gain in this game by either killing wild monsters or keeping your chimera happy in cages. The former method is inefficient but intuitive to find out, but it took a while to discover that you had to keep chimera pens. I would've figured it out eventually, but I feel like a tutorial quest should include building a pen? Another big leap in resource gathering was iron. No where in the game does it tell you that you need tier 2 in perks to access iron. The perk just says 'you can mine tier 2 rocks' which is just so uninformative. What does tier 2 even mean? It's so vague. You need iron to finish one of the errand quest but by the time you get there, you might've spent all your time maxing out other points because you didn't know to save for that perk. These are two horrible game design flaws that I feel like shouldn't be excused by 'no tutorials'. It feels deliberately hidden to cause the player to slow progression. Lastly, the pacing of the game is horrible and poorly done. Grinding in video games is healthy when the game loop is satisfying, with lots of milestones in between. This game goes from 0 - 100 real fast and you're just expected to repeat that grind with zero new content or even smaller check points in between. It becomes very unsatisfying and not worth it. The jump between killing a few monsters vs your first boss is pretty big, especially if you go a squishy magic build. I also wish I could reset my build but I don't think there's an option for it? Or if there is, the game certainly doesn't tell you. The few positives: I did enjoy creature catching and it was cute to swap between them. The early-mid game is quite fun and the initial basic discovery was quite enjoyable. Using spells felt like a unique aspect and I liked the world building.

I'm glad I got a CD key of this game because it's definitely not worth the money spent to get it through steam. There is absolutely no reason for a game to be able to delete your save data, no reason at all and the one possible work around would be to back it up to steam cloud and the game can't even use it. I'm glad I was only about 2hrs in cause I would be pissed if I was farther along and lost everything.