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Game Details
Language: English (en)
Current Version: 1 License: GPL Development System: Inform 7 Forgiveness Rating: Merciful Baf's Guide ID: 3019 IFID: ED239114-64D5-4EE9-B7C8-E26BF6B9E57F TUID: az8jb9bddngurwr7 |
Awards
Nominee, Best Game; Nominee, Best Story; Nominee, Best Use of Medium - 2007 XYZZY Awards
1st Place - Spring Thing 2007
Editorial Reviews
Play This Thing
Interactive Morality
Fate is a piece I come back to again and again in my thinking about the interactive potential of narrative, because it attempts something rarely done: It allows the player to craft a character who is not just "good" or "bad" or "aligned" to one or another ethical philosophy, but the representative of a more complex morality, one without labels. And there are a few strong moments where the player comes face-to-face with the cumulative implications of her choices, and they surprise a little.
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SPAG
Despite the lack of a set time limit, a sense of urgency is created by the impending birth of Catherine's son. The player is periodically reminded that Catherine is very pregnant, often by painful descriptions. This sense of urgency blurs some of the moral and personal decisions Catherine must make in order to change her sons fate. Not wanting to spoil anything, I'll just say that some of these moral dilemmas are quite effective at disturbing a player who feels complicit to the wrongdoing.
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating:  Number of Reviews: 6 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews
Grappling with age-old questions of ends and means, April 5, 2008Fate initially appears to be a somewhat typical text adventure. As you play, though, more layers begin to appear as you decide just what you are willing to do to protect yourself, your unborn child, and your country. Your first couple of choices are quite morally unambiguous, but later choices are not so easy at all. Are you willing to sacrifice an innocent life to save a country? Does a man who committed a murder decades ago and sincerely repented still deserve to be punished for it? These are the sorts of questions you find yourself grappling with. You always have the choice to say no, to say that the end does not justify the means. However, the stakes are high for you and yours as well.
One might argue that the game is a bit manipulative. At several points when faced with what the game obviously wanted me to regard as a stark binary decision I thought of a more morally acceptable third way, but was refused the freedom to act on my idea. Nevertheless, Fate dares to ask the sort of big questions that conventional IF seldom gets near. A must-play for everyone.
Fate and Decision, October 17, 2007Fate 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).
Sufficiently makes its point, could have been more rewarding, May 6, 2010I just finished Fate my first time through, and I thought it was an interesting game that makes some interesting points and is definitely worth playing.
I did feel both that the game forced binary choices when there were other available options, however, and that the choices didn't feel like they had as much of an impact as I'd liked because the game plays so much like a game. By that, I mean that you don't worry about killing the aliens in Space Invaders because it's a game, it's set up, and that's what you do. This game is obviously more developed than Space Invaders, but I some of the NPCs were presented as transparent obstacles in the same way. Only a few choices really had an impact for me, and I think that more could be done to both give you a chance to develop your own character and to develop empathy toward the other characters.
As such, even though I'm aware of the existence of other endings and I can think of the points where I might have made things move differently, I'm not really compelled to play again and try to play it differently. I imagine that it has a certain degree of replay value for those who are, but that didn't really work for me. (I am wondering to what degree you can make the plot advance without making the choices I made, but not quite enough to replay.)
Still, it's a neat concept, and executed well enough to get the idea across.
See All 6 Member Reviews
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Recommended Lists
Fate appears in the following Recommended Lists:Not Too Long, Not Too Difficult by Eric Mayer
Being impatient and puzzle-challenged, I prefer rather short games that I can make it through without resorting to hints every other turn. The following leap to mind, in no particular order.
Tragedy in interactive fiction by lobespear
The following games that play with the medium were used as examples of approaches to tragedy in interactive fiction at a Cambridge University lecture in 2007.
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These are games that for some reason or over I just couldn't stop playing and thinking about. There are no specific reasons given. These aren't necessarily my favorite games; one reason they are pageturner is that the pacing is good and...
Polls
The following polls include votes for Fate:Games where you can't screw up by Pinstripe
Sometimes, when I'm playing a game, I spend more time juggling my save files than I do reading the text. I don't want to have to restart because I picked up the green rod instead of the clay jug (with apologies to Zarf). So I'm looking...
Best cover art by MathBrush
What games have really good cover art?
Games with high replay value by Wendymoon
What games do you find yourself returning to again and again? Maybe to get every last lousy point, to do some amusing things, to try for different endings or just for the enjoyment of replaying?
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