Serin Fate is a pixel-art adventure RPG, with gardening, creature tending, unlockable difficulty modes and classic storytelling! Discover your Magic powers, collect Chimera (regional creatures), and travel the world as a Witch. Inspired by Harvest Moon, Legend of the Seven Stars and Pokemon.
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Oof, a negative rating that stings to put down, especially because I supported this game on Kickstarter!
So much care and thought and inspiration went into this game, and the fact it was developed by a single person is an admirable feat! The game has a lot of written lore and history to do with its story and races, and while simple to hearken back to older RPGs, it's still detailed and hearkens back to a time where EVERYTHING had a description box, even if it was just every barrel saying it was empty. I’m a sucker for such attention and getting every little little ounce of potential out of what you make. This even bleeds into the themes where magic and witchcraft permeate everything down to the smallest mechanics. The music is whimsical and truly the only part of the game I want to revisit, just having such a nice, nostalgic energy of all its own.
But care and inspiration alone does not make a game.
In fact I would say ‘inspiration’ is the biggest downfall of Serin Fate, as it takes too much from other games it tries to emulate without accounting for the way so many different mechanics would interact with one another, creating a cumbersome, unfocused play experience.
The game is constantly at odds with itself about what it is and what it wants to be, and what it wants you to do compared to what you actually HAVE to do to make progress. I would like to throw myself into the game to find all it’s secrets and experience all the small details of the world that has been created, but death is very easy and punished heavily not by the loss of resources, but time and slow combat to the point I do not want to go off the main path for fear I will just lose more time.
Combat is clunky and basic with a dedicated mode you need to go into that is different from farming, easily cheesed with the use of a hide spell and not at all satisfying. Hitting an enemy feels the same as missing them with a lack of weight. No matter what weapon or armor I donned I felt just as fragile as I did with the previous tier of equipment, unless I was willing to sink time in to grind for better things.
Familiars are touted as a big part of this game, with 50 to collect and all sorts of ways and conditions they spawn under, they are a staple of the combat and can make your life so much easier with one on your side. However, adding them to your collection is disappointingly simple, with you just needing to input a spell and get as close to them as possible. The spell will do its best to auto-lock on, and if the spell hits then there is a percentile chance if you capture the familiar, nothing more. There is no way to fight them, make them stay put, stun them, it is as if the Safari Zone from older pokemon games had the (minimal) strategy taken out of it and all you could do was throw Pokeballs, nothing else.
Almost everything being tied to magic is interesting lore wise, but mechanically a nightmare. There are many, many spells to remember and it can take multiple casts to understand or piece together the function a spell is performing. It becomes a game of menuing to check and re-check spells. Menuing in this game can also be cumbersome, some of it is just unintuitive UI that’s a bit clunky but bearable (like there being a million items to craft but no way to search through them), but there are some decisions that are simply atrocious such as making an important farm tool a key item, forcing me to navigate to the key items menu any time I wish to use it and making it act completely differently from other farming item that perform similar functions. If it is that important, just give me a dig spell instead so it acts like the rest. To add all these extra steps is pointless.
It requires grind, which while not in of itself is a sin to me as someone that has lived on and loved plenty of grindy games, the issue of grind in this game is that it is required by the dev AND unenjoyable. If you are going to include grind, that it your decision, but if players are going to be forced to spend their limited time to make progress with systems that are cumbersome and a high risk of failure, I believe then there is a duty to make sure that experience is as fun and reward as possible, where they feel they are making progress bit by bit instead of just struggling through the area until they reach the next blockade.
Ultimately, Serin Fate is an esoteric classic RPG trapped in the skin of a farm/resource management, a good example of an identity crisis in game form. It takes itself much too seriously, believing itself to have the gameplay chops of classics from the SNES era and that it can improve the resource gathering and animal care aspects of Harvest Moon while taking the wrong notes from those games that inspired it. I do not believe this is a game that should have been made as difficult as it is, turning away a number of people that would have been genuinely interested if it was willing to lay off on what it asks of the player. The difficulty and minimal tutorials Serin Fate touts is not an issue, it is the frustration of its game design not being properly melded into something more cohesive and smooth. I can’t even say the game is clunky in a charming way because the issues I have with it only breed frustration and steals my time. I cannot recommend anyone spend their limited time on this game, except for the truly diehard and willing.
So much care and thought and inspiration went into this game, and the fact it was developed by a single person is an admirable feat! The game has a lot of written lore and history to do with its story and races, and while simple to hearken back to older RPGs, it's still detailed and hearkens back to a time where EVERYTHING had a description box, even if it was just every barrel saying it was empty. I’m a sucker for such attention and getting every little little ounce of potential out of what you make. This even bleeds into the themes where magic and witchcraft permeate everything down to the smallest mechanics. The music is whimsical and truly the only part of the game I want to revisit, just having such a nice, nostalgic energy of all its own.
But care and inspiration alone does not make a game.
In fact I would say ‘inspiration’ is the biggest downfall of Serin Fate, as it takes too much from other games it tries to emulate without accounting for the way so many different mechanics would interact with one another, creating a cumbersome, unfocused play experience.
The game is constantly at odds with itself about what it is and what it wants to be, and what it wants you to do compared to what you actually HAVE to do to make progress. I would like to throw myself into the game to find all it’s secrets and experience all the small details of the world that has been created, but death is very easy and punished heavily not by the loss of resources, but time and slow combat to the point I do not want to go off the main path for fear I will just lose more time.
Combat is clunky and basic with a dedicated mode you need to go into that is different from farming, easily cheesed with the use of a hide spell and not at all satisfying. Hitting an enemy feels the same as missing them with a lack of weight. No matter what weapon or armor I donned I felt just as fragile as I did with the previous tier of equipment, unless I was willing to sink time in to grind for better things.
Familiars are touted as a big part of this game, with 50 to collect and all sorts of ways and conditions they spawn under, they are a staple of the combat and can make your life so much easier with one on your side. However, adding them to your collection is disappointingly simple, with you just needing to input a spell and get as close to them as possible. The spell will do its best to auto-lock on, and if the spell hits then there is a percentile chance if you capture the familiar, nothing more. There is no way to fight them, make them stay put, stun them, it is as if the Safari Zone from older pokemon games had the (minimal) strategy taken out of it and all you could do was throw Pokeballs, nothing else.
Almost everything being tied to magic is interesting lore wise, but mechanically a nightmare. There are many, many spells to remember and it can take multiple casts to understand or piece together the function a spell is performing. It becomes a game of menuing to check and re-check spells. Menuing in this game can also be cumbersome, some of it is just unintuitive UI that’s a bit clunky but bearable (like there being a million items to craft but no way to search through them), but there are some decisions that are simply atrocious such as making an important farm tool a key item, forcing me to navigate to the key items menu any time I wish to use it and making it act completely differently from other farming item that perform similar functions. If it is that important, just give me a dig spell instead so it acts like the rest. To add all these extra steps is pointless.
It requires grind, which while not in of itself is a sin to me as someone that has lived on and loved plenty of grindy games, the issue of grind in this game is that it is required by the dev AND unenjoyable. If you are going to include grind, that it your decision, but if players are going to be forced to spend their limited time to make progress with systems that are cumbersome and a high risk of failure, I believe then there is a duty to make sure that experience is as fun and reward as possible, where they feel they are making progress bit by bit instead of just struggling through the area until they reach the next blockade.
Ultimately, Serin Fate is an esoteric classic RPG trapped in the skin of a farm/resource management, a good example of an identity crisis in game form. It takes itself much too seriously, believing itself to have the gameplay chops of classics from the SNES era and that it can improve the resource gathering and animal care aspects of Harvest Moon while taking the wrong notes from those games that inspired it. I do not believe this is a game that should have been made as difficult as it is, turning away a number of people that would have been genuinely interested if it was willing to lay off on what it asks of the player. The difficulty and minimal tutorials Serin Fate touts is not an issue, it is the frustration of its game design not being properly melded into something more cohesive and smooth. I can’t even say the game is clunky in a charming way because the issues I have with it only breed frustration and steals my time. I cannot recommend anyone spend their limited time on this game, except for the truly diehard and willing.