Introduction

Hand of Fate is a 2015 game by indie game studio Defiant Development. You are a mysterious adventurer, having crawled through trials to go against a mysterious dealer in a game of Life and Death. For what reason? It is a mystery, but the adventure gets harder and harder as time goes on.

The Gameplay

You start out a session picking out your difficulty and, if you're not in the game's Endless Mode, different cards to represent the encounters and equipment you'll see along the way. You can also let the game recommend the decks for you. The game builds you a dungeon made up of many levels of card layouts that you traverse to eventually reach the boss at the end. The boss lets you progress to the next dungeon. And did I mention curses? Yeah, there are plenty of curses, some locked to the story dungeons. You also get to contend with the dealer, who will add his own cards to the deck just to spite you.

As you succeed against encounters you'll unlock new cards, which may lead to more cards themselves. Unlocks also get progressively more difficulty; they start from feeling like freebies, all the way to needing a multi-playthrough session only to realize that you should have brought that ring along, not this one, and you've died for your troubles.

In short:

Select the opponent you want to go up against.
Build a deck of encounter cards and a deck of equipment cards.
Optionally, change your character's starting modifiers.
Make your way past the encounters you selected, set up in multiple randomized layouts, managing your resources (food, gold, health) and equipment along the way.
...and hopefully, defeat that session's opponent! Or die.

Dying may happen a lot at first. Sometimes it's from lack of skill, and sometimes the RNG just fucks with you. This is especially true if you have a row of bad cards and no food to eat. You just have to dust yourself off and try again, which isn't bad. The game has a really cool amount of replayability. You can play around with starting decks to modify your encounters and see if they'll give you an easier time, and different weapon and armor builds will change not just the action experience, but modify some encounters as well.

I really like Hand of Fate for how unique it is—I've seen it described as an action RPG, but it blends action segments with card drawing, deck building mechanics, and random adventure layouts. The studio got around to making a sequel, but sadly, that was the last game they made.

The format

This LP will be somewhat casual. I want to show what it's actually like to play through the game, and while this won't be a 100% LP (unless I die that much), I'll be showing off as much of the unique content as I can such as story dungeons, some of the DLC, and runs of Endless mode to unlock new cards. This LP is getting dialed up to 100. I will be unlocking every encounter the game has to offer, and showing off as many of the encounters and as much of the equipment as I can. A few things are hard enough to encounter that you'll have to try for yourself.

I'll also be showing off Fates! These are character archetypes that act as difficulty modifiers. The audience has voted:

code:

Soldier's Training |||
Merchant guard	   ||
Iron Hunger        |
Nomad              |||
Explorer's Gift    |
Warlord            |

The Soldier's Training, Nomad, and Merchant Guard fates will be shown off in Story Mode, but I'll show the rest off in side videos.

Spoilers?

Everything's fair game!

The Let's Play Archive

Hand of Fate

by Anaxite

Introduction

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