Review: Hand of Fate

The Moving Hand writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

– Omar Khayyám

A glowing tavern, echoing with a harp’s quiet strumming; a cowled thief, skulking in a leafless forest; a dusty road, cacophonous with traders and travelers in the daytime, silent under the watchful eyes of brigands at night — these are the scenes of high fantasy with which so many of us are familiar. I can hear, smell, and feel these rich worlds, though most of my experience with them has been through the medium of books.

Defiant Development, had they read my soul and designed a game based on my own image of the perfect fantasy world therein, could hardly have produced a world more seamless with that image than Hand of Fate, with one caveat: they made it a nightmare.

In a nightmare, you don’t remember your purpose. You have no purpose, nor end, nor beginning, and neither does the world around you. Whether you find yourself in a jungle or a bustling metropolis, time, colors, morals, and constructs all flow and reshape like water in a dark and octo-dimensional river.

As you wander alone in this nightmare that overflows with life, you notice a kind of horror, like that of the world outside your childhood bedroom, or the forest outside the walls of a tavern long into the night. You sense a creeping darkness; a consistently inconsistent, unexplained and unjustified, winding and often misshapen nightmare in which you, by the grace of the unseen divine, yet find moments of calm, warm, and soft serenity. Though, all the while, you sneak and steal around the dark, pursuing it, chancing upon it, brushing your hand across its roiling surface.

Hand of Fate is the Resident Evil typewriter room, expanded into a full game. It is an exercise in the beauty of a purposeful purposelessness, driven by a deep and nihilistic passion. Its aesthetic prompts a journey of the soul, filled with frustrations and triumphs, fear and relief, curiosity and revulsion.

But I hate bad endings. Bad beginnings can be surmounted. Bad mid-sections can be borne for the promise of the triumphant finish. But bad endings leave me shaken, unsure, and infuriated. I did not, and never have, completed Hand of Fate. The last levels are simply too hard. Granted, I do have a low frustration tolerance. Certainly, I was five seconds away from winning twice already; clearly, if I just tried one more time, I could make it.

Hand of Fate is fundamentally a card game, meaning everything from the weapons you find to the events you encounter, to your character’s vitality, rely on luck of the draw. I take little issue with this. The “card-game” feel is built cleanly into the world, and the unpredictability enhances the beauty. And I will admit, on my second play-through of the game, I only finally had to hit the retry button on the second-to-last dungeon (with a couple of armrest-clutching one- or two-HP-lives along the way).

But to beat the final level, you have to have the luck of the draw every step of the way. The crippling curses with which your character becomes burdened at the beginning of the last dungeon are enough to make you think twice. But when one bad event three steps before the final fight drains all your health, you have to restart. The last fight is simply too long, too complex and difficult, to face at all weakened. Didn’t get lucky on your card draws and missed out on the perfect armor combo? Better restart. Grappling with the (oh and did I mention) clunky movement controls and stepped on an apparently unavoidable laser-beam hazard that’s still buzzing around even after you already beat the final boss and you’re just waiting for the ending cutscene to roll? That’s a restart. My skill in writing is simply not deft enough to capture the outrage the last level inspires within me.

What I do know is that, in the end, Hand of Fate the game fails Hand of Fate the world. Sitting within the perfect 5-10 hour play-through category, the first 95% of Hand of Fate reads, or plays, like an original and enrapturing take on the fantasy novel form, with the benefit of audio, visuals, and a healthy amount of input from the player. But I’ve spent another 5 hours already just throwing myself at the final dungeon, with nothing to show for it. I simply will not spend another entire game’s worth of time trying to overcome this random number generation just to make it through that last 5%. Even if the prize is finally being able to say, if only to myself, that I finished Hand of Fate.

But despite all that, I can’t but love this game.