Serin Fate Reviews

Well made.

I was really conflicted thinking of whether to recommend this game or not, but I think in terms of what I consider to be a 'good' game vs 'bad' game and decided that this is ultimately not worth getting into. First big gripe with this game: The developer tells you outright that there is no real tutorials or hand holding and you basically just need to figure out things on your own. I'm perfectly fine with that, in fact, I normally prefer it. However, if this is your approach, your game NEEDS to be intuitive. I'll give a few examples of how counter intuitive this game is: There are key items in the game that blend in too easily with the background and you can miss it completely. In most games, when you get past a dungeon or find a secret path, there's usually a big open space and in the center is the key item to grab. In this game, it literally blends in with the environment so well that I can't tell if it's decor or a key item. I had to read through guides to figure out where Geez's hat was. As it turns out, I passed it many times because when I was in the area for it, I thought it was just decor or something because there was so much garbage on the map, it blended right in. Same with the rope and shovel. At least highlight key interact-able items. This goes hand in hand with the previous issue: the puzzles are horribly designed (if you can call them puzzles?). Some areas are hidden or seem inaccessible, which is fine, a part of exploration and adventuring is discovering how to get there. However, the way this game is executed is awful. Like I mentioned in the paragraph above, everything seems to blend in. To access some areas, you have to interact with a hole in the wall. And to me, that's not a puzzle....it's just a 'GOTCHA! It was there all along! - kind of thing, which is lazy game design. The little hole in the wall literally just looks like decor because rocks and crevices have texture so I just assumed that it was a part of the pixel art. The pacing of the game relies on getting certain resources but does not even inform you about how to get to that step. There is a blue coin currency that you gain in this game by either killing wild monsters or keeping your chimera happy in cages. The former method is inefficient but intuitive to find out, but it took a while to discover that you had to keep chimera pens. I would've figured it out eventually, but I feel like a tutorial quest should include building a pen? Another big leap in resource gathering was iron. No where in the game does it tell you that you need tier 2 in perks to access iron. The perk just says 'you can mine tier 2 rocks' which is just so uninformative. What does tier 2 even mean? It's so vague. You need iron to finish one of the errand quest but by the time you get there, you might've spent all your time maxing out other points because you didn't know to save for that perk. These are two horrible game design flaws that I feel like shouldn't be excused by 'no tutorials'. It feels deliberately hidden to cause the player to slow progression. Lastly, the pacing of the game is horrible and poorly done. Grinding in video games is healthy when the game loop is satisfying, with lots of milestones in between. This game goes from 0 - 100 real fast and you're just expected to repeat that grind with zero new content or even smaller check points in between. It becomes very unsatisfying and not worth it. The jump between killing a few monsters vs your first boss is pretty big, especially if you go a squishy magic build. I also wish I could reset my build but I don't think there's an option for it? Or if there is, the game certainly doesn't tell you. The few positives: I did enjoy creature catching and it was cute to swap between them. The early-mid game is quite fun and the initial basic discovery was quite enjoyable. Using spells felt like a unique aspect and I liked the world building.