Drinkable Chicken

For the last few days, I’ve enjoyed playing Fate. (I’m using the OS X version, which works rather well on my MacBook.)

It’s a dungeon crawler, not unlike Nethack with pretty graphics, or Diablo. Although Nethack is probably less superficial, Fate has a lot of things going for it, that kept me going back over and over again.

Basically you look around the village for quests, then enter the dungeon to fulfill those quests (e.g. fetch an item, destroy a certain monster). While you’re at it, you pick up gold, weapons, treasure, and rack up experience points. Then you return to the village, sell the items you don’t want, and possibly upgrade your gear (get better weapons and armor, etc). Repeat.

You don’t have to go it alone; at the beginning of the game you get a pet (either a dog or a cat), which helps you fight monsters. It is also useful in other ways; for example, it can carry items and can even be sent back to the village to have these items sold. Pets cannot die, although they will temporarily flee when low on HP.

The game is quite over-the-top in some ways, like the names it uses for weapons and monsters, or cumulative abilities. For instance, at one point my weapon of choice was called “Holy Strong Battle Fork of Strength”, and there are names that are even more out there. Also, as you can see in the screenshot below, that weapon had like ten additional abilities (added by me, using gems and magic anvils).

The ability to enter cheat codes is built into the game. When I tried this, it made the game simultaneously more and less interesting. Less so, because the challenge was gone; after all, I could now level up, heal, get any item I want, etc. But also more so, because it made my character more customizable; I changed my pet into a wyvern, got the weapons I wanted and added gems to them, improved my defense, etc. (I suppose using the cheats changes the game from quest-oriented to some kind of RPG-flavored Sims variant, which is of course an entirely different playing experience… but not necessarily an unpleasant one.)

Anyway, I’m kind of done with it now, but I’ll probably return to it at some point for some more dungeon hacking. ^_^  Worth checking out if you have a Mac or PC.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia entry
• reference info (possible spoilers!)
• cheats
• reviews: Gamespot, 1UP, GameSpy