Dry Fate

Welcome to this Dry Fate review, a game brought to you by PianoTm and Frogge.
There are four versions (updates) of this game plus one with no need for RTP and I guess I played the last one. Erm, I am almost sure!

Dry Fate start in the most classical way: the world is dying (and drying) after the death of the World Tree of Life or something like that. The mayor has no other choice that hire a young promising boy that may be stupid as a lamppost but at least he's the son of a famous hero, and send his on his quest to save the world.
That's just a floating island with their village and nothing else, but hey... they make a great tea there!

Oh and you get the privilege to name this (dumb) hero (I named him Alfvit. You get it, don't you? Yeah I'm sure you do.)!


Being nuked by an angel that curses is a new experience...

Dry Fate is a nice short classic adventure game that consists in four dungeons, one puzzle and four boss fights.
One things I learned soon (and I liked a lot!) is that your party is automatically healed and restored after each victory, but this does not happen if you flee, so it's suggested to fight each battle to the end! Even if enemies are always visible and avoidable, I also suggest to fight at least 3/4 of the opponents of each map or more, so you can safely face the (higher level) monsters on the next map. Anyway please mind that new abilities are earned after each boss fight (and similarly there are no shops so you have to rely on the gear and consumables found during the adventure, in any case there will be no shortage of them). The two party members have two kind of abilities: skills (that cost TP, earned hitting and being hit) and spells (that cost MP, only one of the two has them), and some require some turns of "cooldown" before being used again. A simple system but well done due to the decent variety of attacks, almost all useful, considering that some enemies have resistances and weaknesses to particular attacks.

The dungeons are reasonably well designed and detailed (coincidentally the first is probably the most boring and less original of the whole bunch! I liked more the one ones), the difficulty goes from medium to easy and you can only save at the various bodies of water (that are rare since the world is DRY!), or at least at moste of them (for example not at the one at the entrance of the wood dungeon).
Ok then the puzzle: this is a bit tricky and the game warns of this, since you have to set the levers in the right position that is determined by the movement of the enemies. My suggestion is to take note of the movement before trying to enteract with the lever since it's almost guaranteed that you'll be attacked before using the lever... and then you will have no enemy movement to check (since the enemy will disintegrate after combat)! The only solution is exiting and re-entering the area since this restore the enemies (but I did not need to do that since I was able to remember the direction).

Ok so gameplay is pleasant and graphically it's nothing new or extremely special but still pleasant to the eye and well done. What else? Oh yes, the game is a pleasant parody, dialogues is hilarious and well written. I had fun, really, I don't think I will play it again but I did both endings because I was curious (strangely the final boss is easier than the penultimate enemy... that is really tough!).


... and also being defined dumb by the party members is a new experience for me!

Verdict
Dry Fate is a well written lighthearted short fantasy adventure with really few flaws. Here they are: the "silencing attack" doesn't work as intended since the enemies retain the ability to cast spells, BUT it does a huge damage, so it's still pretty useful. The puzzle is ok but maybe some players may hate it, anyway I don't think it was too bad, I only wish that the character named Kaffe had a bigger role in the story since I felt it a bit underused... but hey mi opinion!

In the end I liked this little parody of the classic heroic journey to save the world, the story and the gameplay were nice, the dialogues were excellent. I had fun. Considering that this was also a collaboration made for an event this game gets a 3.5/5 from me. Pretty good!
Ok, this is the end, I'll go and make some tea now...