Hand of Fate 2 (2017)

• Year played: 2019
• Playtime: 5-10 areas
• Completion level: first few areas completed

I played the original Hand of Fate a few years back and loved the concept of it: you are playing a card game where you lay out your cards on the table and move your character token from card to card, taking whatever action is on it. The cards can be anything: visiting a shop, doing a quest, finding treasure, fighting a horde of enemies, and more. The catch is that you aren't the one building the deck - at least, not all of it. You are competing against a dealer, who puts certain cards in the deck for you, usually the start point, the end point, and whatever "main quest" cards in between are needed to flesh out the challenge. Then, you add your own cards to the mix.

Your cards compose the random encounters, the shop contents, and everything else. So the goal is to understand what type of adventure the dealer is throwing at you, and build a deck that gives you the best chances to succeed against it. If the quest is to kill a troll, and you have a troll-bane weapon card, you probably want to put that in. If the quest is set in a frozen tundra that causes you to take frost damage on every step, maybe you want to include some events that give you extra healing potions. And so on.

My biggest complaint with the original game was the jarring switch from turn based tabletop gameplay to the combat encounters, which are played out in third-person real-time action. The combat controls were clunky, the camera angles sucked, and it was easy to lose a good run just from fighting with the combat controls and failing.

The second iteration improves on all the core mechanics and more importantly, makes the combat way smoother and less frustrating. It's a compelling game with an interesting gimmick and a cool dark aesthetic. My biggest complaint is that the switch port doesn't have great performance, the loading times are extremely slow, particularly when you enter a combat encounter. This becomes even more painful when you're going back and repeating the same content over and over, since the game requires a of of trial and error in building your deck and seeing how well it fares against the dealer. I like this game and would like to play it more, but the performance is a bit of a killer.

Playtime: 40 minutes

In Hand Of Fate 2 you create an adventure by building a deck that contains allies, items and encounters. You start with the ally, can find the items and randomly get the encounters while playing.

Encounters are either text adventures with multiple choices and/or fights. Fights involve small groups on both sides and take place in small areas. Combat is very basic. Attack, block, dodge, armor-removing attack, ally-skill - that's about it.

After completing an adventure you unlock new cards. It's a cute idea, and the narration and presentation are decent overall. But the combat is frankly boring and that kills the game for me.

Hand of Fate 2 is a game that, in theory, should rank among my favourites of all time. It tickles almost everything I love about games, and yet it falls shy of the 5-star mark.

I've really gotten into D&D lately, and HoF2 is a phenomenal fantasy narrative that has given me so much inspiration for what makes a good campaign. Its bite-sized stories, evocative writing, charming characters (especially the Dealer, whose voice actor nailed the role) and complex political factions make for a wonderful setting. What's more is that after completing the game I started reading about the characters and story, and there's actually a brilliant metanarrative tying this game back to the original. The levels are not actually chronological, and when put in the right order (based on how much sand is in the hourglass in the background, an incredibly subtle indicator) they tell an amazing story that I won't spoil here. It's never obtrusive or gets in the way of the main quest, but is a stroke of genius from the writers to anyone observant enough to notice it.

In terms of gameplay, I love a good deck-builder, and this is a formula that I haven't seen replicated elsewhere (outside of the original). Considering what enemies you're likely to face, gambits you'll play, and resources you'll need, you choose a selection of cards and combine them with ones chosen by the Dealer to create the unique encounters for the level. These are randomly laid out as you move from beginning to end of the path, and each new card brings the promise of food, fame, or wealth. And these resources are so important to manage because you might need them at any moment; so much of the game is about being in a position where you can take advantage of an opportunity when it's presented to you. You might need apples to give to a hungry child lest you be cursed. Perhaps if you have just enough coins you can obtain a rare item held by a passing merchant. Maybe if you're famous enough, the townsfolk will provide you with special favours, or you can talk your way out of a fight.

And fighting makes up about half of the game. At first I thought the combat was boringly simplistic: one button to attack, one button to block, one button to occasionally dodge an unblockable attack, and one button to stun/break armour. Yet despite this straightforward formula, I rarely got out of a fight unscathed. Sometimes there would be so many sources of potential attacks I couldn't quite keep my eye on all of them, or I'd roll out of the way of an unblockable attack right into the path of another. But most commonly, I'd be so tunnel-visioned on finishing off an opponent that I wouldn't even notice an incoming attack until it was too late and I couldn't react to it. The game was never unfair about this - if I was truly patient, I could fight twenty enemies at once and never once be hit as I cautiously took them out one by one. But this was nothing compared to the satisfaction of getting of getting into the flow of battle and sliding seamlessly from offence to defence, cutting down enemies left and right, blocking and rolling and stunning and stabbing, ending with a spectacular slow-motion finisher by circling around a foe and crushing their helmet beneath my hammer, or driving my sword into their torso and heaving them over a cliff. Each weapon handled so differently, and the combat taught me so much about how I want to describe battles in my D&D game.

The other main mechanics are the gambits, perfectly balanced between chance and skill. Card games can be won if you closely watch the cards being shuffled. Precision gambits are nothing short of skill tests (though you can tip the odds in your favour by waiting for the target to line up with the edges where the pendulum's swing is slowest). Wheel challenges are perfectly fair, with the consistent speed meaning it's up to your consistent timing. The dice rolls are the only truly random gambits, influenced only by considering probability and luck.

These elements combined with one of my great weaknesses: completionism. The unlockable tokens and shards from getting specific outcomes, or from accomplishing a particular goal like riposting x many times. It was an addictive formula, and the more I unlocked the more I wanted to unlock.

And that's where the missing star went: I became exhausted from the effort of it. There were so many options, so many choices, and as I replayed and replayed each encounter chasing that elusive token, hoping for the right combination of resources or items, I realised that the game had stopped being fun for me. Those elements I loved - the stories, the new experiences, the powerful items, had all been replaced by a relentless grind. In the end, it just wasn't fun spending hours playing the same challenges hoping for the right RNG to get a weapon I probably would never use.

Overall, this was a truly fantastic game, and I'm so impressed by the dev team for creating something bold, unique, and better than the original in every way. A great classic.