Game of Fate: Chasing Through Time

I'll be honest: my first instinct when something tagged 'RPG' and 'Simulation' turns out to be a full-motion video dating sim is to close the tab. But the reception on this one made me dig deeper, and the numbers hold up. Near 90% positive across close to a thousand Steam reviews is not a fluke for a niche Chinese FMV title, and once you understand the actual structure, the score makes sense. What you are actually buying is a live-action interactive movie with a branching case-solving spine. The story jumps between 2019 and 2024, following a first-person protagonist piecing together a serial murder mystery alongside a cast of eight characters - including Qiu Shuya, Cheng Linwei, Gu Siqi, and Jiang Man, each with their own route and unlockable ending. The developer advertises over fifty distinct endings with hundreds of branch points, and community playthroughs confirm the mesh-like structure is genuine: getting the true ending requires clearing four separate character-specific perfect routes first. That is legitimate replay architecture, not padding. The scene-map chart that lets you track visited branches is a thoughtful quality-of-life feature, and previously seen scenes can be skipped, which matters when you are on your third or fourth route pass. The FMV production itself is competent rather than cinematic. Video defaults to 720p with an optional 4K download that carries no story differences. First-person shooting creates decent immersion but the camerawork is occasionally shaky, and acting quality varies across the cast, with some performers landing their scenes and others falling flat. The bigger problem is the English localization, which reads like a rough machine translation pass. Typos, grammatical errors, untranslated text in some messages and notebooks, and subtitle timing mismatches where a long sentence flashes past in the time the Chinese audio uses three syllables. It is serviceable enough to follow the plot most of the time, but it will pull you out of emotional scenes at the worst moments. Western players should walk in with adjusted expectations on that front. The tarot card collectible system unlocks after three hours of play and gives completionists a secondary objective: over 100 character cards with different designs, tradeable on the Steam Market. It is a clever identity piece that ties thematically into the fate-and-destiny framing of the story. The requirement for a constant internet connection on a singleplayer title is annoying and unexplained, but apparently not deal-breaking for most of the player base. One genuine frustration flagged by multiple community reviewers is the date-selection screen between scenes, which is sluggish and cannot be skipped even on replays - a small friction point that accumulates across a full completion run. This is emphatically not a game for players who want puzzles, investigation mechanics with real logical deduction, or any kind of agency beyond dialogue and route choices. The interactivity is limited by design. If you are a visual novel reader who does not mind live actors instead of illustrated characters, or a mystery fan happy to watch a story unfold rather than solve it mechanically, the branching structure and the genuine emotional weight of the character arcs offer solid value. Just mentally re-shelve it from 'RPG' to 'interactive movie' before you start, and the experience clicks into place.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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