Hand of Fate

Hand of Fate sits in a genre intersection that almost nobody else has attempted: a deckbuilder where the cards become a roguelike dungeon, which then becomes an action-RPG. You're playing across a table from a robed dealer in a cabin at the end of the world. He shuffles your deck — encounters, equipment, monsters, story cards — and deals it out as the dungeon you're about to descend into. Each card flipped becomes a location, a fight, a choice, a piece of loot.

When combat starts, the perspective shifts. The cards you've collected fly into the player's hands as fully modeled 3D assets — armor, weapons, items — and combat plays out in real-time as an action-RPG combat sequence somewhere between Batman: Arkham Asylum's flow and a more traditional hack-and-slash. Defeat the enemies on the card, and you return to the table to flip the next one. Win the run, and you progress through the thirteen gates of the world toward the final confrontation with the Ace of Skulls.

Deckbuilding is the metagame layer. As you complete encounters you earn new cards to add to your deck, and you choose which equipment, enemies and events to bring into your next run. Building the deck is half the puzzle — putting in cards that earn rewards versus cards that punish you, balancing risk against accumulation — and beating the deck you built is the other half. Hundreds of encounters, items, weapons, armor pieces and artifacts unlock across multiple suits, each capped by a Jack, Queen and King fight that gates further progress. A gamepad is the recommended control method.