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.

Got through 50% of the game and sadly, this is just one of those 'not for me' titles. This is a game made by developers all about capturing the feeling of retro games, and they sure do accomplish that in every way, good and bad.

My biggest gripes lie in what I feel is the wasted potential of the power ups and the super heavy platforming. There is a notable lack of room for error given to the player when moving from platform to platform, even a few steps off and you WILL fall down off into whatever lies below and just the sheer slowness of it all, akin to forcing the character to go through molasses or a permeant water level, just without any of the lower gravity you can experience beneath water.

This issue could be solved through the powerups, but they are only situationally useful. You can only have one per level, and if you are going after a secret of some kind they usually require a certain powerup within the level meaning some levels you are just locked into one if you want to get everything. It was a disappointing realization, to say the least.

I understand where the appeal is for this sort of challenging game, it's just not for me.

It honestly stings a bit to rate this game so low because so much of it is my jam, but I have to be honest in I did not enjoy the experience as much as I could have.

Even now I am still in love with so much of the game and it's ideas. I think an environmental story telling game told through moving around objects and sorting them in genius. The pixel art is wonderful and it's nice to be able to zoom in and out and see all the little details, the level or care that went into the place you explore is delightful.

But that artistry is cut down by a monotonous gameplay loop and that by the time I was playing this game, I had unintentionally already seen almost all the interesting things it had to tell story wise.

While it is 'realistic' to have to unpack your underwear every time you have to move someplace new, it is not fun. Especially when I can only move them one at a time. Or when moving one towel to a different bathroom in the house make it invalid and you have to click through multiple rooms to get it back to the bathroom it's supposed to be in, even if the other should work just fine. These small things create a slow build of frustration as the amount of rooms and items you need to deal with get bigger and bigger.

I am also not one to go out of my way to watch gameplay of games I am interest in, I don't avoid it per say but I try to keep myself relatively in the dark. On occasion I would see a steam clip or video of someone playing Unpacking on social media, see a little environmental story detail, and go 'neat' and move on with my day. Completely unaware, that now that I have played the game those clips and moments I would see were most of the major moments of environmental story telling in the game. I was incredibly disappointed when I discovered that, and it shot my enjoyment of playing the final level in the foot hard... with salt being rubbed into the wound when my game crashed in the final room of the final level and I had to redecorate the entire final level again, from scratch.

The little moments of joy I experience while playing saves it from being a one, along with the creativity and hard work of the artists and programmers that designed the system, but please go in blind as a bat for what the game entails on top of tempering a lot of patience for what you'll be asked to do.