Half Past Fate is an odd, stylish cross between a visual novel and adventure game that’s basically a rom-com in indie game form. Since it takes more of a Love, Actually ensemble cast approach to its storytelling, you play as a rotating cast of characters, some of whose stories play out over the better part of a decade, and these seemingly disparate storylines occasionally intersect while building up to a day where everything comes together for everyone. Half Past Fate can be an incredibly sweet game, and the way even its minor characters reappear so that you can track how their lives change (or don’t) can be incredibly fulfilling. Rarely, though, the good intentions of characters can cause some of this sweetness to feel a touch contrived and unbelievable. Still, the story comes together in a really nice way, and the game’s simple mechanics rarely get in the way.

I went a bit crazy with the screenshots for Half Past Fate and ended up with 4,576 screenshots at 3840x2160. As always, those are available here.

Half Past Fate has plenty of oddball gaming humor to go along with its romantic comedy stuff

You play as six different characters in Half Past Fate: Rinden, an unlucky-in-love vice president of an investment firm; Mara, a hapless and impulsive creator of an eco-friendly generator; Ana, a tea connoisseur and temp at Rinden’s company; Jaren, a video game store employee who meets Ana at a tea festival; Bia, a photography student and friend of Mara’s sister; and Milo, a filmmaker who quickly becomes best friends with Bia. Each character’s life is inextricably linked to one of the other characters. Mara is pitching her generator to Rinden’s company, for example, while Jaren loses Ana’s number and tries to follow clues to find her again. Some of these characters are more present than others, however. Bia and Jaren probably have the majority of the playable chapters, with Bia’s friendship with Milo evolving over an 8½-year period and Jaren running all over town in search of Ana. Effectively, Bia allows Half Past Fate to show off some of the characters almost a decade in the past and Jaren’s aimless wandering intersects with their current-day routines. All of this builds up to a night where everyone ends up in the same bar together.

I found myself weirdly invested in Half Past Fate‘s side characters. Seeing a once-heartbroken gardener Bia had introduced to a fawning onlooking years prior still glued to her side is one of those small touches that add a lot to the end experience. The main characters are enjoyable, too, but their relationships are a great deal less subtle. Half Past Fate‘s world is a bizarre construction where almost the entirety of the populace plays the role of the free-spirited best friend in a romantic comedy, urging complete strangers to follow their heart no matter the cost and offering this advice at the slightest provocation. Not everyone is looking for love in this game, but the number of people who prioritize romance above all else can start to feel distractingly artificial.

There’s plenty of sweetness, though, and that sweetness is balanced out by a healthy dose of gaming-centric humor that I really appreciated. Digs at an overly-complicated crossover game called “Empire Cardiac” (a play on Kingdom Hearts) are welcome, and partway through a decently long series of tasks that requires picking up a video game for someone, the game shop owner acknowledges that Jaren is on a fetch quest. Not all of the humor is gaming-oriented, of course. Plenty of the jokes revolve around the awkwardness of the main characters and the bizarreness of some of the side characters (like an NPC that spends 8½ years on the phone with someone named Dave who keeps sending him to the wrong locations). You’ll definitely get the most out of the writing if you’re familiar with gaming and its related subcultures, though.

The gameplay isn’t challenging but breaks up conversations into more managable chunks

Half Past Fate isn’t a game that aspires to halt your progress with difficult mind-teasers. Not at all. This is a story game first and foremost, with its gameplay serving the primary purpose of breaking up the dialogue into more readable segments for the sake of pacing. You can obtain items from the environment and use them on characters and objects as appropriate, but what you need, where to find it, and who/what to use it on is always a straightforward process. In fact, you can’t even obtain these items until you know that you need them. Fortunately, each scene takes place in a smallish area that’s easy to get around in. You won’t be doing any laborious backtracking in Half Past Fate even if you overlook an item.

That’s not to say that you can’t do anything interesting with items, though—there are a bunch of achivements that require experimenting with using objects in certain ways, and going out of your way can occasionally unlock an extra scene in your current chapter. Sometimes, you find yourself holding a tire or something and can’t help but wonder what’ll happen if you walk away with it, and experimenting with those little what-ifs and bothering people in this weirdly nice world are always fun.

There are a couple of points where I got stuck and wasn’t sure where to look, though. The first occurred when I was changing a tire and couldn’t find something to put behind the car’s tire. It turns out that I was missing some rocks that I had continually overlooked. The other time I became stuck was in the last chapter when a bird swiped a phone, and after obtaining food to lure it back to land, I couldn’t find anywhere to use it. The solution is admittedly embarrassing: you have to walk closer to the railing near another character, at which point the camera pans over and the interaction becomes possible. In my defense, though, that’s not as clear as it probably should be. This final chapter takes place in a significantly larger space and highlights why the smaller areas of previous chapters were a much better fit for Half Past Fate‘s gameplay.

I only encountered a couple of bugs, and they were very minor and mostly cosmetic ones

Half Past Fate is incredibly polished, but I did encounter two bugs. The first caused the wrong portrait to show up for one of the characters so that they were having a conversation with themselves (I included a screenshot of this below). The second was during the same chapter and occurred when I was mashing my way through dialogue—which can’t be skipped—and triggered some dialogue immediately after the beginning cutscene ended, which caused part of the opening conversation between Bia and her boyfriend to repeat while they automatically walked out of the house. I didn’t capture it on video, unfortunately, nor could I replicate it. Mashing can be a problem in general, though; sometimes dialogue scrolls and requires two inputs to skip to the next line, while other times it all appears at once and requires one. Dialogue options also appear instantly, making it unbelievably easy to select the wrong choice at certain points unless you wait for all of the dialogue to scroll onto the screen by itself.

Half Past Fate‘s gorgeous pixel-adjacent art and interesting soundtrack have serious style

Visually, the only game I can compare Half Past Fate to is Party Hard 2, though that’s only a starting point because this leans far more into pixel art than the “voxel” look. Half Past Fate‘s 3D world is made up of pixel art that’s used to convey 3D, basically, and it looks great. Birds fly away when you approach them, clouds cast shadows on the ground, and there’s a tiny amount of chromatic aberration at the edges of the screen that seems to double as a subtle blurring effect. I appreciate how colorful everything is, too. Half Past Fate‘s soundtrack is also unique enough that it’s difficult to draw comparisons, but I won’t let that stop me: most of the music sounds like the chirpy instrumentation of a Phoenix Wright game mixed with the bounciness of a 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game and the cheerfulness of classic jRPG town themes (personally, I’d go with “Autumn” from Lufia 2).

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ -- 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Half Past Fate review. It took me 5-6 hours to finish at a leisurely pace, but there are some hidden scenes that encourage an even slower approach.

Half Past Fate review – Sugar cubes in game form first appeared on Killa Penguin