PREVIEW: Serin Fate

Witches aren’t bad, right?

Released: Steam Early Access
Type: Single-player
Genre: Adventure, RPG
Developer: Vethergen
Publisher: Crytivo
Release Date: March 10, 2020

Overview

Serin Fate is a Stardew-Valley-kind-of-meets-Pokemon game where you get turned into a witch and given a treehouse with a big garden, which has… seen better times. The striking aspect of Serin Fate is the huge amount of expected features for the complete game: if everything goes as planned, the game could potentially have tons of hours of content. For a one-man team, the project is surely ambitious!

The first steps

After the first, brief introduction you find yourself in your treehouse in the company of another witch, which will let us choose one between three chimeras. Pokemon style. After this, you are basically free to go wherever you want: you can start killing monsters roaming the territories around your house, clean your garden, practice magic, visit the city near you… for a game in alpha stage, there sure are a lot of things to do… which is also the main weak point of the game, at this stage. Why? Because, at the current stage, the game doesn’t seem to have one main objective and the gameplay is fragmented into a lot of small activities that are often already seen in other games, like fishing, gardening or mining. Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine as secondary activities, but the game currently lacks a focus, like farming was in Stardew Valley.

The game has already a number of possible activities, but lacks focus.

Spells and broomsticks

The magic system in Serin Fate uses elements to cast spells: in the game there are basically five elements which, once combined, could make a castable spell. There is only one requirement, namely that you already have learned the spell. Spell ara initially useful for the various activities: the woodcutting spell summons ghost axes that cut down the targeted tree, while capture traps chimeras, glow makes a light around the player and so on… Spell learning isn’t super clear from the start and progressing in this regard can be rather frustrating.

Spells can be learned by acquiring them from the library… for a conspicuous cost. The same is valid for broomsticks and other magic trinkets!

Combat

While combat is in real-time, it has many similarities with that of Pokemon: your characters doesn’t fight, but instead gives orders to his chimeras, which can use different attacks and abilities. Since everything is in real-time, the chimeras abilities and enemy attacks will have a cooldown time and, initially, this can make battles awkward: running around in order to avoid the monster while every ability is recharging isn’t that fun, especially if your chimeras’ attacks miss repeatedly.

Cacterpoke was my initial chimera: a moving cactus with legs sitting inside a pot. How cute!

Future developments

Serin Fate currently features 25 hours or so of content. The core of the game is well fleshed out and everything more or less works. In the expected 12-18 months of early access the game will have to receive new content (spells, chimeras, new areas to explore) and a much-needed tutorial or initial phase to let the player understand how the game works. It is critical for the final release of the game to have a well-implemented main quest system, in order to give a main purpose to the player.

The village situated near your home is rather big and has buildings spanning multiple areas.

Verdict

Serin Fate is still in a very early phase of development and still has a lot of time to improve, but I was impressed by how the core of the game is implemented and already working. For a game in alpha stage, there are already a good number of hours of content and a lot of areas to explore. If you’re interested in Serin Fate and plan to buy it sometime in the future, you can as well do it now!

Written by
texdade
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