FATE

FATE is the 2005 action-RPG from WildTangent that won runner-up for PC Magazine's Role-Playing Game of the Year and went on to spawn three sequels, becoming one of the most-played casual dungeon crawlers of its era. The setup is straightforward: you arrive at the town of Grove on the edge of the Old Wood, descend through the Dungeon Gate, and fight your way down into procedurally generated caverns, dungeons, mines and tunnels in pursuit of glory, treasure and the eponymous fate.

Combat is quick, immersive and unambiguously classical action-RPG — point-click attack, spell hotbars, gear drops from defeated enemies, levels and stat allocation between fights. Procedural generation keeps the dungeons fresh across runs, with each new descent producing different layouts, enemy placements and loot drops. An economy of buying and selling items in Grove balances the dungeon-spelunking with shopping-and-equipping cycles, with a luck-based option to gamble on shopkeeper deals if you'd rather take risks than play it safe.

The pet system is the franchise's signature contribution. You choose a dog or cat companion at the start, and as you feed it specific items and let it accumulate experience, it evolves into progressively more powerful creatures — a mechanic that anticipated by years what later genre entries would build whole games around. The Steam release of FATE adds trading cards, badges, emoticons and profile backgrounds for collectors, and the core gameplay loop is preserved in the same shape it had in 2005.