Nuclear Throne is yet another entrant into the increasingly-crowded roguelike¹ genre, this time with the twist that it’s been spliced together with a twin-stick shooter. I find the recent glut of roguelikes (or games with roguelike elements) a little tiresome, especially since playing a bad roguelike is one of the most painful gaming experiences you can possibly imagine, but I do enjoy the good ones. Nuclear Throne is one of the good ones.

Nuclear Throne has been made by established indie developers Vlambeer (who were responsible for the very-okay shooter Luftrausers, as well as other games that I haven’t played), and it just got released last month after a year in Early Access. It has the same basic not-entirely-intentional retro look as the rest of their output because it’s been made in Gamemaker; however so was the original Spelunky, and just like Spelunky its cheap n’ cheerful looks conceal a shockingly well-tuned and downright fun game. The Early Access period has done Nuclear Throne a world of good and it’s come out of it with core mechanics that are just as sharp and polished as anything else in the genre that I can think of.

I described it as a roguelike crossed with a twin-stick shooter, and if you have a gamepad (or if you buy it on console) you can play Nuclear Throne that way if it catches your fancy. It’s decent enough in this role; I don’t think a thumbstick is quite precise enough for the weapons involved, but it certainly doesn’t strike me as broken or deficient in any way.  However I played it on PC with a mouse (controlling aiming) and keyboard (controlling movement with WSAD), and it’s in this mode that Nuclear Throne really shines. Where you point the mouse cursor is where your little mutant will shoot the bullets (or lasers, or crossbow bolts, or shells, or rockets) regardless of which direction he (or she, or it) happens to be moving in at the time, and the only inaccuracy involved is that built into the weapons themselves – plus your own kludgey hand-eye coordination, of course. To me this meant the game actually came off as an updated Cannon Fodder crossed with a roguelike, which is no bad thing since those are both things I really really like when they’re done well.

The roguelike elements of Nuclear Throne come to the fore in its metagame. Start a new run and you’ll be taken to a character select screen with the various characters/mutants you’ve unlocked sitting around a campfire. Each character has both a passive and an active special ability, the latter of which is invoked using the right mouse button, but to begin with you’ll have just three available: Fish, who gets more ammo from ammo pickups and whose active ability is a roll move that boosts his movement speed; Crystal, who has more health and can activate a shield that’ll make her immobile but which will reflect all bullets back at her attackers for a few seconds; and Eyes, who can see in the dark and has telekinetic powers that draw items (and enemies) towards him. After picking one of these characters you’re immediately chucked into the first Desert level with just a revolver for backup.

Nuclear Throne’s levels are basic top-down procedurally generated affairs. Aside from being broadly contiguous so that the player can explore them their layout doesn’t make much logical sense – but then it doesn’t have to; unlike most roguelikes there’s no static exit and the goal of each level is simply to kill all enemies present, at which point a dimensional portal will open up to zap you into the next level. Aside from the odd bit of scenery – such as a bleached set of bones, or an exploding barrel — the levels are otherwise empty apart from the various monsters populating them; the closest Nuclear Throne comes to an environmental hazard are the wrecked cars in the ice area that will explode if hit which too much fire. It’s very different from something like Spelunky in that there’s zero traps, shops or other random features that the roguelike genre has popularised.

Instead, Nuclear Throne prefers to focus almost entirely on the shooting action. This would be a serious problem if the shooting were bad; fortunately Vlambeer have some past experience as far as arcadey shooter experiences go and it’s actually very very good indeed. The game is split into four areas consisting of three levels each and which culiminate in a boss battle at the end of every area, and each area has a pleasing range of enemy types mixed in with each other that keeps you on your toes. The starting Desert area has three: a bog-standard bandit that fires only occasionally and is all but harmless, a scorpion that vomits a spread of bullets at you (get behind cover when it fires) and a large maggot with no ranged attack, but which will split open into 7-8 smaller maggots when it dies. It’s moderately taxing for new players but once you have a few runs under your belt the Desert is remarkably easy going, especially considering that revolver they give you isn’t that bad. Those first three levels in the Desert mostly exist so that you can make a few rolls on item pickups and skills and get yourself set up for the real Nuclear Throne, which starts on level 2-1 and never really stops again until you inevitably die.

Each enemy you kill drops a number of glowing green rad pellets in the vicinity of its corpse. These are the game’s XP, but the catch is that they’ll disappear after a fairly short period (about 7-8 seconds) and so you have to get to them quickly before they expire if you want to fill your XP tank in top left corner of the screen. The safest way to dispose of enemies is by shooting them when they’re offscreen — Nuclear Throne has some good sound design that’ll let you get a rough read on where they are — but that’ll make it harder to pick up the XP they drop; this basically forces you to get in a bit closer and dodge their bullets so that you can level up at a decent rate. Once your XP tank is full you gain a level, which means that when you exit the current level you get to choose a mutation for your character from one of four random options. The impressive thing here is that while your character development is effectively at the whim of the RNG there are no skills that are really out-and-out bad. All of the available mutations are interesting and give you a big advantage, whether it’s Bolt Marrow (homing crossbow bolts), Impact Wrists (corpses fly further when they die, bouncing into other enemies and causing damage) or Rhino Skin (+4 HP, which is effectively +50% health for most characters). I get annoyed whenever I see Shotgun Shoulders or Long Arms because I tend not to use shotguns or melee weapons so much, but that’s a matter of personal preference; melee weapons in particular are actually super useful since you can use them to bat back projectiles at enemies. It’s almost never a duff choice, and consequently I’m always excited to receive a new mutation power.

The other half of Nuclear Throne’s character builds are the weapons. You can carry two weapons at a time, switching between them using the middle mouse button (unless you’re Steroids, whose special power is that he can fire both at once), and each weapon uses one of five different types of ammo, making it advisable to pick weapons that don’t both use the same type lest you find yourself running dry on bullets at an inconvenient moment. What’s particularly striking here is the sheer quantity and variety of weapons available; my conservative guess would be well over a hundred distinct weapons, and they can either come out of the red chests you will find on every level or – more rarely – they’ll be dropped by enemies. There’s some logic in place that means you get less powerful weapons at the start of the game (unless you’re Robot, whose passive ability means he gets better drops from the get-go) and gradually pick up better ones the further in you go; don’t expect to be finding a Minigun in a chest on level one. A solid progression for me would be to find an Assault Rifle somewhere in the Desert (accurate, fires a three round burst fairly rapidly) with a Grenade Launcher for backup, and then to transition to some flavour of Crossbow as soon as possible (crossbows are 100% accurate and do a lot of damage, but take a long time to reload). Even within the Crossbow weapon type there’s a lot of variety – Toxic Crossbows which release a poison cloud on impact, Super Crossbows that use two bolts per shot but which do double the damage, Disc Launchers that fire a bouncing projectile, Splinter Launchers that turn it into a shotgun, and – my favourite – the Auto Crossbow, which will kill anything you point it at very very quickly just so long as you don’t mind not having any ammo left afterwards.

Experimenting with weapons is where a lot of the fun lies in Nuclear Throne. I’ve played close to a hundred runs over twelve hours with the game and I’m still finding new ones; just today I picked up a Lightning Shotgun for the first time, which I pressed into service as my backup weapon due to running low on other ammo types and which proved to be very capable of melting the tough enemies found in the final zone of the game. Then there’s the enjoyable puzzle of figuring out a build that’ll make the most of the character you’ve picked; you want to pick mutations that complement both their special abilities and the weapons you’ve picked up. In the short term this provides more than enough variety and replayability to keep you making those runs while you work on the long-term goal of surviving all 16-odd levels to reach the Nuclear Throne. As with all roguelikes actually achieving that goal is only the tip of the iceberg; once you have attained the Throne there’s still more characters to unlock and the looping mechanic to invoke, where you proceed through the game all over again through a remixed set of levels with harder enemy types. That’s for the properly hardcore types, though, and for now I’m perfectly content to just figure out how to make the best of a certain character. Just like with the mutations there’s a broad range of 12-13 characters who all have abilities that are really good for a certain style of play, and there’s no such thing as a bad character in Nuclear Throne. Nearly everything about its metagame is positive and fun, and that’s what’s kept me hooked for this long.

The final thing Nuclear Throne has going for it is its length. There is an achievement for completing the game with a certain character in less than eight minutes, but even if you’re playing careful and taking your time a full run from the start of the Desert all the way to the Throne will take well under twenty minutes. Looping extends that, obviously, but unless you’re very good at the game most runs will end long before you get a chance to loop. This stops you from getting too attached to a given character or too annoyed when you die unexpectedly, and that’s good because if I had one criticism to make of Nuclear Throne it’s that you tend to die unexpectedly rather more often than I would like. This is something Spelunky in particular does very well, in that you almost never die in that game wondering what the hell just happened; by contrast Nuclear Throne is a little too blase about having the level RNG dump you straight into an unwinnable scenario and there’s too many deaths where things happened too fast for me to process and I went from a full 12HP to a dead character in less than a second. It’s not been enough to put me off the game, but it does make it feel like it has a few more rough edges compared to current genre champion Spelunky or even more recent offerings such as Crypt of the Necrodancer. It was probably inevitable given Nuclear Throne’s focus on action gameplay, but it’s still a little disappointing to have the odd unpleasant death marring what is otherwise a incredibly well-crafted experience.

Still, Nuclear Throne is a great game that’s more than worthy of the rave reviews it got in December. The off-kilter yet excellent soundtrack (reminiscent of Diablo’s acoustic guitar, or the later bits of Tubular Bells) is the icing on the cake, and it’s successfully displaced the waning Hearthstone as the thing I boot up when I want twenty minutes of disposable fun. I doubt it’ll have all that much longevity – I don’t really see myself putting in the 60 hours I did into Spelunky or Dungeons of Dredmor – but I’ve more than had my money’s worth so far, so that’s not a huge problem for me.

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With the recent surge in popularity for both the virtual card game and roguelike genres, the only really surprising thing about Hand of Fate is that it’s taken this long for somebody to come up with the idea of fusing the two together.

But then it’s the obvious ideas that are often the most difficult to think of, and while Hand of Fate’s deck builder crossed with a RPG is seemingly obvious – it’s been done to a somewhat more limited degree in the Thunderstone card game, for example — there are certain elements of it that are outright inspired, first and foremost of which is humanising the RNG that draws the cards.  You assume the role of a nameless warrior sat across the table from a dungeon master who is responsible for dealing the cards, seeding the deck with nasty surprises, and providing a constantly cynical commentary on your actions in a very Treguard-like manner. Exactly who he is — or who you are — is never outright stated, but the things he says hints towards this being a Seventh Seal-type scenario: you are dead, or close to it, and you’re playing against him for your life. Hence, Hand of Fate.

What exactly are you playing here, though? There’s two main components to Hand of Fate that you assemble prior to starting a game: the Equipment deck, into which you can insert various helpful items that you’ll have a chance of picking up on your travels, and the Encounter deck, which is what drives the adventures you’ll have and the monsters you’ll fight on your travels. When the game starts, the dungeon master shuffles all of the decks and deals out cards from the Encounter deck face-down onto the tabletop. You won’t know exactly what these cards are; all you’ll know is that they’re the cards you put into the Encounter Deck before the game starts. A dungeon entrance card is also played face-up onto which a piece representing your character is placed, which you can then move around from card to card, revealing and resolving each card’s encounter along the way. Your goal is to find the exit to the next dungeon level, and (eventually) to locate and kill the dungeon’s boss.

That’s pretty standard roguelike fare, but the twist Hand of Fate puts on it is twofold. First, the fact that most of the cards are resolved via text — and maybe a random draw to determine success or failure — means that it can have a lot of variety as to what each encounter card can be. They can range from encountering merchants to treacherous terrain that has to be navigated to interrupting an unholy ritual to summon an undead lich; they can be pretty much anything, and this makes Hand of Fate a good bit livelier than your typical roguelike as long as you’re willing to put a little imagination into it. Second, and more important, is that the first time you get the “best” outcome on an encounter you’ll be awarded a small token that goes into a bowl in front of you. If you’re doing well you can amass quite a sizeable collection of tokens, and at the end of the game, win or lose, you get to cash in these tokens for new Equipment/Encounter cards that you can add to your decks for the next game.

This is where the deck builder element of Hand of Fate comes in, and I have to say it works very well indeed. Because it doesn’t tell you what a given Encounter card does until you’ve actually encountered it in a dungeon, you have to strike a balance between known Encounter cards that you know will (or at least should) have a beneficial effect during your dungeon run but which won’t get you anything new, and unknown Encounter cards that could have risky events on them but which could also lead to new loot/cards. If you stack the deck just with unknown cards it’s likely you’ll come a cropper as bad outcome after bad outcome saps your life until you die; there’s a definite element of playing the odds and managing risk here that’s common to all deck builders, especially since you also know you’re not going to encounter every card you put into the Encounter deck unless you take the extraordinary risk of exploring every space in the dungeon.

Why is doing this risky? It’s because of the food mechanic. You start each dungeon with a set amount of food that increases every now and again as the dungeons get longer. Each space you move in the dungeon — whether you’ve flipped the card in it over or not — will heal you five life points, but it’ll also cost you one food. If you ever run out of food you start losing ten life points per space moved, and eventually you’ll starve to death. You can acquire more food by buying it at one of the shop cards the dealer seeds into the deck, by getting it as a random reward out of the Gain deck for successfully completing an encounter, or as a set reward for a specific type of encounter, but the catch here is that you have to actually find one of these Encounter cards before you can get the food; otherwise you’re stuck looking at a food counter that’s slowly ticking down to zero. This makes doing more than the bare minimum of exploration risky unless you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to stockpile on food, as you could easily end up killing yourself through wasteful consumption otherwise.

Here we’ve encountered a couple more game elements that Hand of Fate excellently contextualises into its card-based conceit: the Pain, Gain and Monster decks. These are decks that do change slightly from game to game but which you have no power to alter, and they’re used solely for managing Encounter outcomes. An Encounter will sometimes require you to fight a random selection of monsters that are determined by drawing one or two cards from the Monster deck, which can be anything from Lizardmen to Lava Golems. If you successfully complete an Encounter that gives a reward you’ll usually draw from the Gain deck to determine what it is; gold, food, or the chance of drawing a card from your Equipment deck that you can then equip and use in battle. And if you fail an Encounter the penalty for doing so will often be to draw one or more cards from the Pain deck, which mostly consist of cards that reduce either your current or maximum HP totals.

This is all ultimately a very fancy way of dressing up a random number generator, but — as with the dungeon master — by putting it into the context of drawing cards from a deck it’s made a hell of a lot easier for the player to swallow. Said context is helped immensely by the time and care that’s been put into illustrating and animating the cards so that the action of drawing them gives off a very tactile and real feeling. This is something that (for example) Space Hulk got horribly wrong by sticking all of its dice rolls into the backend of the game; if you’re making a video game facsimile of a physical game then you need to make it feel as real as possible to the player in order for them to buy it, and Hand of Fate is absolutely on point with this. It could just show you the drawn cards face up without any deck animations, but it’d be a far poorer game for it, especially since so much of it relies on that player-versus-dungeon-master adversarial setting.

It helps that even these relatively static decks aren’t purely affectations, as occasionally you can inadvertently seed new monster types into the Monster deck by completing an Encounter card that unleashes them into the world.  Every time you defeat a boss their card also goes into the Monster deck as a random encounter that can potentially happen at any time in a subsequent Dungeon. For a game played entirely with cards Hand of Fate is surprisingly big on your actions having consequences; the tokens you “win” for completing events often reward you with cards that are unambiguously good, but they can also seed your Encounter deck with cards where you have to battle groups of monsters who are enraged that you slaughtered their leader. Most tokens given for completing an Encounter card will usually also unlock another Encounter card that continues the previous Encounter’s storyline, allowing HoF to string together rudimentary storylines. On the flipside the dungeon master also seeds various decks with his cards to make the various dungeons more difficult; these range from Encounter cards that are usually negative, to Curse cards that make parts of this particular dungeon extremely painful.

The card game part of Hand of Fate is very well done. It really is. The dungeon master has lots of lines for each individual Encounter card, taunts you when you run out of food, and will even comment when you’ve died a particularly stupid death. This segment of the game never, ever breaks character, playing out like a particularly brutal game of D&D against a particularly dickish DM. Unfortunately there’s another part of Hand of Fate that I’ve avoided mentioning up until now because it’s the one thing that mars an an otherwise excellent game, and it’s the elephant in the room: the combat system.

Hand of Fate’s combat system baffles me. I really don’t know what possessed the developers to think that a mediocre Arkham Asylum ripoff would be appropriate for their card-based light RPG, but it’s in the game and it kind of sucks, all things considered. Whenever you fight monsters your character transitions to a 3D arena where he dons all of his equipment as each of your equipped item cards is played, and then you’re off hitting and countering just like Batman would. Well, not quite like Batman. Batman was more fluid than this; the player character in Hand of Fate is fast (if you’re not wearing heavy armour, anyway) but when you’re actually trying to hit people with him he handles like a brick, locking in on the wrong enemies in uncancellable attack animations and getting stabbed in the bottom for his trouble. Combat can take place in any one of a dozen random arenas, some of which are far too small for the number of enemies you fight in them – especially considering your best chances of survival against large packs of monsters are hit and run tactics — and while the game tries to spice things up a bit with environmental traps these end up being very hard to spot unless you know they’re there, meaning more often than not you’ll inadvertently blunder into them and die.  It’s also terrible at telling you that e.g. you’ve just run through a poison cloud that’s practically invisible, or that there’s a ranged attack coming in from offscreen that’s about to nail you through the throat, or that the bad guy you’re targeting is currently blocking and can’t be hurt. Too many times I died without quite knowing why, or took huge quantities of damage because the controls were so clumsy that meant I was too weak to finish the dungeon. I’ve probably died more from starvation than I have from the combat, but it’s the combat deaths I find more frustrating because it’s so at odds with the risk management of the deck builder side of Hand of Fate. It’s just a terrible fit for the game, and it really drags things down to the point where it’s actively putting me off the final set of dungeons because the enemies keep levelling up and getting increasingly bullshit abilities.

Still, I will try to push through to the end, and once I’m done with the story dungeons there’s always Endless mode. Hand of Fate isn’t a particularly dense game and I wouldn’t expect it to keep you occupied for dozens of hours like a conventional RPG would.  It does lean little too heavily on its poorly-fitting combat system for my liking, and at the end of the day its various adventures are resolved either by that or by a very well-disguised RNG, so if you have problems with either of those it’s possible Hand of Fate isn’t really for you. Otherwise it’s a fascinating curio that’s well worth checking out if you have fond memories of ‘90s board games such as Hero Quest  because that’s the part that Hand of Fate really nails: it feels exactly like that sort of light proto-RPG transplanted onto a computer screen, complete with cards, tokens and playing pieces. That part of the game, at least, is innovative, well-designed and plays to its theme incredibly well.

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