Lucy recommends: At Fate's End
No fate but what we make for ourselves.
Hey folks and welcome to the weekend!
I'm getting ready to head to Montreal on Monday to attend MIGS for the first time. I'll be checking out some games and chatting to developers, so posts may be coming through a little later than usual as I'll be at the convention for a couple of days, but I'm sure I'll have lots to talk about from my time there.
I've got an excellent demo for you to try out this weekend: At Fate's End from Thunder Lotus, the team behind 2020's emotional and unforgettable Spiritfarer®: Farewell Edition. I first played At Fate's End at the ID @ Xbox event at GDC earlier this year (I honestly spent most of the event queuing to get on it, it was, rightfully, a hot pod to be on!) and have been eager to play more. There's a meaty 90-minute demo available now, more on my thoughts and a chat with Creative Director Nicolas Guérin after the jump!
At Fate’s End is an action-adventure game where you fight the ones you love and your skill tree is your family tree. Explore a lush fantasy world, defeat the foul creatures of the realm, and face your estranged siblings in intense, emotional duels to decide your family’s fate.
Thanks to my paid LFG Supporters!
This week, they got a bonus newsletter featuring my thoughts on Steam approval process delays and my review of Death at Fleming Manor (spoiler alert: it rocks). I'm also running a giveaway in the Supporter Discord for copies of TANUKI: Pon's Summer, remember that you have until November 9 to enter!
If all that sounds like something you'd be interested in, consider subscribing! You can opt in to pay monthly or yearly (which gives you two months free!).
What is At Fate's End?
As Shan Hemlock, the youngest of the noble Hemlock family, you inherit the title of Princess of Swords. To complete the ritual, you must collect all of the magical swords from your estranged siblings... but they're not exactly eager to part with them.
Return to your family's ancestral home, piece together what's happened since you've been gone, and confront your siblings to decide your fate.
What's the gameplay loop of At Fate's End?
🤔 Figure out what secrets your siblings are hiding. There's an element of deduction to At Fate's End (yes, yes, no wonder I like it so much). Pick up key pieces of information by examining your surroundings and talking to people, then use your insights and observations to piece together what your family prefers you didn't know: it may come in useful later
Your skill tree is your family tree. Perhaps one of the coolest parts of At Fate's End is how it handles skills. I'll dig into this more below featuring comments from Nick, but the idea is that as the youngest in a noble family, you naturally benefit from those who came before you. At Fate's End handles this by each skill coming from a member of your famous (or infamous) family
🗡️ Time to d-d-duel. You've got a stunning magical sword and boy are you going to put it to good use in exciting battles against all manner of foes. Your sword Aesus can absorb some of your sibling's powers, represented by tarot cards which you slot into a deck, and this is how you configure your build. These tarot cards can be placed either upright or reverse, and which way up affects which ability you can use. For example, your brother Roman willingly gives you a power: put the card in one way and you get a teleport attack, in reverse it's a harder hitting static one. This also works to impact the world state, like changing the time of day or the game's difficulty
Who's making At Fate's End?
At Fate's End is being developed by Thunder Lotus, the Montreal-based studio behind Spiritfarer, Sundered®: Eldritch Edition, and 33 Immortals. The core team is roughly fifteen people.
Try the At Fate's End demo yourself!
Why At Fate's End rules
Huge thanks to Nick for speaking with me!
Style and substance: I simply have to start with At Fate's End's art design and animation because the game is absolutely gorgeous. I started to play the demo on my handheld (it runs great, by the way), but very quickly stopped so that I could put it on the big screen to soak it all in. It's beautiful and elegant, with backdrops that ooze style and hints at untold stories. Its characters, whether human or otherwise, steal the show every time they're on screen with subtle, beautiful animations. I'm obsessed with the way Shan toys with her hair in particular. Not only is it enviously thick and luscious, but the animation is so delicate and intricate, I can't help but think that most games just simply wouldn't bother with having it at all. I'm so glad Thunder Lotus did, I think it adds a quiet anxiousness to the character, and it's a testament to the attention to detail. Yes, there are many incredible, over the top action sequences where swords are ripped from throats, but I love the beautiful, quiet moments like these.
I also adore the way the areas unfold as you explore. The game is 2D, so naturally, you explore left and right, but to reach new areas you move into the foreground or the background: with each new location a new layer in the game's paper craft theatre. It's exquisite, and Nick agrees. "The art is gorgeous through and through and as a designer, I've always thought that the art is what gets people in and the gameplay is the reason why they stay there. I'm lucky enough to have a team that, you know, the art is what brings you in but sometimes it's also what keeps you there because it's so f****** gorgeous to play through."
Noble blood: "Your skill tree is your family tree" isn't just a nifty sales line, it's also an intriguing comment on how Shan can reckon with being born into a complex family, and how she can use that to take her fate into her own hands. As the youngest daughter of a noble family, she's been born with immense privilege: wealth, social standing, and power (literally). But being born a Hemlock also comes with baggage: a sense of duty and the feeling that your destiny isn't yours to own. Nick tells me that family dynamics are naturally incredibly interesting to him as a writer, but a noble family provides an opportunity to toy with the trope that the knight on a steed is perhaps not coming to save us all.
"Family is generally portrayed as something virtuous and in truth I feel it's also the cradle of all the problems we have as human beings. Every family has secrets and if you dig enough you will find something that you didn't think was there in the first place. That's for a normal family, but add on top of that the burden of an aristocratic and noble family and that puts that to the extreme. How much family and money can corrupt you or, in rare cases, uplift you is still fascinating to me."
Shan's once-great family isn't so great any more, with the siblings becoming estranged and their ancestral home basically in ruins. We meet a couple of her siblings early on, like her beleaguered sister Camilla, more fond of drinking than taking care of her people, and Roman, the more chipper brother. Navigating these inter-personal relationships and digging into what went wrong and why your siblings feel the way they do is a key aspect of the game, and from my time with the demo, I felt that these characters were complex, and layered. Despite almost killing me on our first meeting, Camilla has a softness and playfulness, while clearly masking her own sadness. Fighting her later on, and bringing up these touchy subjects adds an extra layer to these boss fights: you really get her where it hurts. "I've always loved the idea that in English you say a fight to mean a very tough conversation between two people," says Nick. "At first we had a Monkey Island thing where we had insults thrown at each other, but then again we were making an action adventure fantasy game, [...] so having swords clash was kind of a given."
And clash swords you will, as you need to prove yourself against your siblings in battle, obtain their magical swords and finish the ritual to become the Queen of Swords. Fights are snappy and flashy: they'll certainly test your mastery of the game's combat and your positioning. Your siblings are older, wiser, and more practiced with a blade than you are, but luckily Shan can stop time with the right trigger, which means that you can take a beat, reposition, and get some hits in. It's something I was thankful for and relied on lot, Camilla is a tough fight.
Metroidbrainia: At Fate's End is a Metroidvania, and while there are keys and blocked paths, it also gates the player with questions too. As Shan pieces together what her siblings have been up to, broad questions are presented to the player, and they fit answers in like a detective game. Clues and insight can be found by exploring and talking to other characters, and helpfully collected in the form of cards. I found gating progress in this way effective in ensuring that I was paying close attention to the characters and writing, but it also provides a helpful hint as to what I should do next.
I asked Nick how the team designs a Metroidvania (answer: it's "supremely hard"), and when you have two systems working to gate the player, what happens when they get stuck?
"We've all grown up with Navi, and it's like 'You have to do this, go there, you have to do that.' Navi is so good willed, Nav'i never tells you wrong things, you are used to having that very benevolent guide that lets you go through the game because without that thing you're kind of lost, right? Which I love as an idea, but I guess the first idea we had because we're kind of f***** up people is what if Navi is bad? If Navi made you put a hood on and rob a bank, would you do it? I mean, I guess, yeah, because that's pretty much what the game's asked me, which links back to the free will aspect of it.
What's fate if you're always guided by something that tells you what to do? I still love the idea of having something that is first your way to be better, your guide, your companion, but is there a secret there? There might be. We do have the sword helping you throughout this, and the sword is your way to let you manipulate fate through the tarot cards and all the clue cards you get. So when you're stuck somewhere the sword will tell you, 'Well you have to do this first to go through that door.' Sometimes it's pretty straightforward, sometimes it's super mystical and you don't get it and there is a reason why. So we also play with expectations of what do I need to go forward? Where are the keys I've missed to open these doors? For the most part it works, but it's also one of the reasons why we had to postpone the game: it's such a massively complex system of trying to understand where you're blocked and it's a spider web of of threads and things going forward at the same time, so we have to make sure that we don't miss opportunities."
Final thoughts: Spiritfarer has stuck with me for a long time, and from what I've played of At Fate's End, I think it will too. It's shaping up to be a deft exploration of complex family dynamics: the shattering and rebuilding of trust, and how hopeless it can feel to be your own person amidst generations of expectation and duty being placed upon you. I can't wait to see how its story ends and who Shan decides to be.
Thanks for reading! I'll be back on Monday with Peek at the Week. Hope you have a lovely weekend, whatever you're up to. I'm going to try and go see Godzilla. Bye!