Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short

The premise is that you are trapped in a hot-air balloon, drifting perilously towards a volcano, accompanied by an uncooperative NPC who is carrying entirely too many heavy objects. Your task: get rid of everything that is weighing down the balloon so that you and your companion do not become one with the lava.

This is a very entertaining one-room puzzle game with a Weird Victoriana theme. It avoids some of the claustrophobia of other one-room games because the balloon is constantly in motion and the view outside changes as you go; the chief NPC is grumpy and untalkative, but in a convincing way; the puzzles are well paced.

The original version had some annoying parsing errors, but these may have been rectified in later releases.

This game concerns a male character called in to assist some beautiful girls who have unusual abilities and ought to be much more powerful than himself, but who somehow can't get anything done without masculine direction.

The male-wish-fulfillment aspect may come from the dating sims PK Girl partly emulates. All the same, I found the premise fundamentally unappealing and did not want to play to the end.

Fate is an exploration of player choice and moral dilemma in interactive fiction, and as pioneering work, it's worth a play.

I’m not sure how much “Fate”’s moral dilemmas worked for me, though. The central question always comes down to balancing suffering — are you willing to hurt X in order to save Y? — and while there are many permutations and many outcomes possible in the game, the choice often felt essentially arbitrary. Gijsbers does attempt to sketch in story, to provide weight and characterization to some of the characters, but I felt there was not enough meat here to make the major decision points really powerful.

So I enjoyed the game, and I thought it was an interesting essay in designing IF. I also thought it did not quite accomplish what it could have if it had framed its dilemmas a little differently (pitting different principles against one another) or else developed its characters more deeply (to make more interesting the choice of who has to suffer).