Hand of Fate: Stacking the Deck! Demiboy vs. Backlog, Game #12

Hand of Fate is a curious animal. It has elements of collectible card games, choice-based RPGs, Roguelikes, and 3D brawlers, but there's no single game one could point to and say "it's like that". The disparate pieces fit together cleanly in some places and awkwardly in others, but whatever its strengths and failings, the resulting hybrid beast is something altogether unique. I found myself deeply ambivalent about the game at the end of my week of play, so my review will be broken into two parts: a largely positive take on the game's overall design, and a critical rant about its painfully lazy endgame. Today the good stuff, tomorrow the not so good!

The first thing that strikes me about Hand of Fate is that there is a lot of randomness. I mean, a lot of randomness. Layers upon layers of randomness! You make your way through a dungeon

1. with floor layouts selected at random,
2. each of whose spaces is a card shuffled up and dealt out. Those represent encounters that can be
3. combats with a randomized selection of opponents in a randomly selected arena,
4. or narrative encounters that may involve choice selections, but most commonly have you pick one of four skill-check results (consisting of outcomes from Huge Failure to Huge Success) at random.
5. Your rewards for passing these encounters and penalties for failing are dealt from shuffled-up decks of "Pain" and "Gain" cards,
6. and a common "Gain" card result is a draw from your shuffled-up Equipment deck.

This guy's behavior and voiceover lines will make you want to strangle him. A good quality for a villain!

 
If these elements were purely stochastic, it'd be a terrible design, the Candy Land of action RPGs! But the story doesn't end there. The player has some degree of control over almost all of the above--not enough to make it non random, but enough to let you shift odds in your favor.

1. Though you can't control floor layouts, you can learn over time where the exit is most likely to show up and plan your exploration routes accordingly. There are also cards you can use to reveal portions of the map.
2. Some encounters come from the scenario you're playing, but the majority is dealt from your Encounter deck, which you get to tailor to your tastes.
3. You don't have a lot of control over what opponents you face, though editing your Encounter deck can make some show up more often than others, and in turn you can seed in cards that exploit those enemy types.
4. The skill checks are not an entirely random draw. There's an animation that plays as the cards shuffle, and with a sharp eye you can tell where some cards landed. You might be able to see exactly where the success cards went, or at least rule out places you suspect got failures. Moreover, the numbers of success and failure results are often influenced by your equipment, like athletic feats being harder when you're wearing heavy armor.
5. You can't edit Pain and Gain decks directly, but you can improve your odds by passing challenges that contain "tokens"; these frequently reward you with permanent additions of stronger Gain cards to the mix.
6. Equipment, like Encounters, is a deck you design from collectible cards. You need a certain number of cards, but which ones go in are up to you.

Strategy in Hand of Fate is thus a metagame of hedging your bets: nudging probabilities to fit your preferred play style and give you the best shot at victory. Do you enjoy playing a swift character who racks up big combos? Fill your Equipment deck with swords, light armors, and speed-enhancing accessories. Want high risk, high reward runs? Put in tough encounters with big payouts. You can't guarantee yourself an awesome run or that you'll never get a crap one, but you can stack the deck such that, on average, you'll get winnable draws more often than not. In the final level, I was able to carefully compose my Encounter deck such that I rarely died before making it to the boss.

But that boss, y'all. That boss is a story for tomorrow, when I write up what I really didn't like about this game.

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