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Hand of Fate is one of a handful of games that I have finished to 100% completion. I have seen and done everything there is to see and do in this game and loved every minute of it. What follows is my honest review looking back in 2024.
Overview
Hand of Fate is an action role-playing roguelike deck-building (woof) game developed and published by Defiant Development. It was released for PC, PS4 and Xbox One in February of 2015.
In Hand of Fate you guide your character through procedurally generated dungeons composed of event cards. These cards can be anything from battles and traders to moral quandaries and betting games. In every run you can customize these cards to some extent, as well as the equipment cards (armor, weapons, gear etc.) you can acquire for beating them.
Gameplay switches between the board view and third person combat. In the board view you guide a token of your character across a board made up of randomly placed face down cards overseen and narrated by a mysterious dungeon master known as the Dealer. Your goal in each board is to find either the exit to the next board or the boss for that run. Usually you’ll play through multiple boards before finding the boss.
When you initiate combat the game turns into a third person brawler game very reminiscent of the Arkham games. Build up your combat multiplier with every hit you land, avoid getting hit yourself. Dodge roll, deflecting and parrying are key.
The main game has you facing a series of twelve different boss runs each with their own unique settings and mutations. One run might have you dealing with more curses while another might limit the amount of gold you can carry. When you beat the boss for your current run you unlock the next run as well as additional cards to work with. Every four bosses the game changes. You unlock new starting gear but also face more deadly challenges.
Story
Hand of Fate’s story isn’t exactly laid out in a linear fashion. As the game opens you are treated to a cinematic of flying cards and a narration by the Dealer. He says you have passed the thirteen gates and now come before him ready to play the game of life and death. This is more or less the gist of the entire game.
You are a warrior named Kallas who has gone through many adventures to confront the mysterious Dealer and try to beat him at his own game. It is insinuated that every trial you face in the game is merely a memory of an experience you had on your way to this table. You fought, and fight, through hordes of enemies (mainly bandits, ratfolk, undead and lizardfolk) and navigate trap mazes and games of chance.
The story is pretty interesting as is the process of piecing it together from the constant ramblings of the Dealer (the only voiced character in the game). You get a vague sense of the world you inhabit but this game is hardly story focused. You may have more questions than answers but none of it is all that important compared to the gameplay.
Gameplay
Before every run you’ll be able to choose a fate for your character. These are destinies that add flavor to the run. They can make things more difficult in exchange for adding unique encounters or just much easier overall.
Hand of Fate gameplay is generally split between the game board and the individual cards. You guide your character token across a board made up of face down cards, turning them over when you move to them. Each card will be a random event drawn from the pool of cards you have unlocked.
Moving on the board costs you one food per move, and you also heal a bit every time you eat food. Your health is static between combats so you have to keep an eye on your hp. Food and Gold are the two in game resources. If you run out of food you lose 10 hp with every board move so it’s important to keep yourself well stocked. Gold is used to buy Food and equipment cards when you happen upon a Shop card.
Often the cards will be simple choose your own adventure style choices. Sometimes they will involve playing a mini game of Four Card Monte in which the cards on offer are either a success, failure, huge success, or huge failure and you have to try and keep your eye on the successes as the cards are rapidly shuffled. Either way many of the cards lead to combat.
Entering into combat or one of the maze/trap dungeons will put you into a standard third person action game mode.
Every card you encounter will have a token attached to it which you can collect by meeting whatever criteria the card has. Usually that will just be succeeding as hard as you can, though some have more complex requirements before you can collect their token. These tokens are the primary means of unlocking additional content in game. New or upgraded events and equipment generally.
The other way is by progressing through the game’s story mode. Whenever you beat the boss of your current run you’ll unlock something. Defeat all the bosses of one type (bandits, undead etc.) and you get a permanently upgraded starting kit and an added level of challenge like for instance faster enemies.
The game has incredible replayability. It’s a roguelike so even when you lose you’ve likely unlocked some shiny new card that gets you excited to try again. I never found myself frustrated playing this game because I could clearly see where I went wrong and how to avoid it on future playthroughs.
Combat
Combat is the heart of this game. It’s immediately engaging and flows extremely well. Its brawler type combat is very similar to the Arkham Batman games and the earlier Assassins Creed games.
You do more damage the more hits you land in a row without being hit yourself. You have to keep an eye out for enemy incoming attacks and either parry them or dodge roll out of the way. If you have a shield you can also reflect incoming missiles back at enemies. In the first Hand of Fate it’s all sword and shield style combat.
You can equip different armors (light, medium, and heavy), which offer more protection the heavier you go at the cost of speed and mobility. Other than your basic starting gear the various pieces of gear you can equip, shields, helmets, weapons, armor and rings typically have significant bonuses attached to them like deadlier combat multipliers or elemental damage. You can wear as many rings as you want so those are worth stocking up on. Blessings are essentially pieces of gear too and they stack as well.
You can also equip one artifact at a time which gives you an in combat ability of some sort with a limited number of uses.
But at the end of the day combat boils down to footwork. You can have all the fancy magic abilities in the world but you still have to be good at dodging and parrying or you will die. Combat is tough but fair. It’ll start off easy with two to four opponents at a time and you can just alternate hits between them so they never get a chance to hit you. But as the game adds bosses and mini-bosses and hordes to the equation you’re going to need to be light on your feet.
Graphics
Hand of Fate looks great. It’s got a stylized almost cartoonish kind of animation that looks good and will continue to look good for years to come. Not a lot to say about it really. It’s good enough that you’re drawn in and stop noticing that there even are graphics after a while.
Development
Hand of Fate was developed and published by Defiant Development after a successful Kickstarter campaign. The studio is best remembered for Hand of Fate and Hand of Fate 2 but has unfortunately closed its doors since the latter’s release in 2017. Hand of Fate had one DLC pack called Wild Cards which added new fates, events and equipment cards.
Final Verdict 10/10
I love this game. It is deeply immersive and fun to play over and over. It never gets frustrating or overwhelming even on the highest difficulty settings. The story is barely a presence in the game but that allows you to sink further into the gameplay. For me this is the superior of the two Hand of Fate games. The sequel is also good but overcomplicates things I feel. Hand of Fate is straightforward to a fault and a good time all around.
